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0 pointsdtdimond3y ago0 comments

It's always been hard for people in those income buckets. But if the question is: are we in a massive economic downturn over the past half year, it's really hard for me to look at the data and answer with a yes.

One thing I'm looking at is:

https://realtimeinequality.org/

And that's showing that for the first time in over a decade, the bottom half is seeing real wage/wealth gains, even after recent inflation. Am I missing something? Because your sentiment is the more common one.

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kradeelav3y ago

Charts can lie. Whether or not you can buy bacon* or gas is real.

*substitute with whatever staple you wish. I used bacon here since it's historically a working class' person's meat.

Red_Leaves_Flyy3y ago

Bacons a funny commodity, I don’t track the futures of it but always look at the grocery store. Pre pandemic bacon was around 2-3/lb for the cheap stuff, 4/lb for quality, and 6/lb for the niche products. I’ve seen these prices double since January this year and some products are up more than 400%. If this isn’ta sure sign of a serious problem I don’t know what would be.

Kon-Peki3y ago

https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/APU000070411...

Government price data for bacon goes back to 1980.

PS - there are other price series about bacon, including regional prices:

https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find?removeAll=1&q=Bacon

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jimmygrapes3y ago

Purely anecdotal but I remember buying 16pz packs of bacon for 1-2 dollars (in a large California city) for awhile, then this phenomenon called "Epic Meal Time" came about and Denny's was making bacon milkshakes and the Internet zeitgeist collectively went "lmao BACON!!" and soon after I was paying 4 dollars per pound. Supply and demand, maybe, sure. In my opinion, it was just demand and marketing.

NOW it's supply and demand, though.

throwawaylinux3y ago

Wages were rising at a similar rate before the covid hit. Remove that dip and continue the line and it would end up in about the same place it is now.

Wealth started growing since about 2019 too.

rdtwo3y ago

Yeah you are missing the fact that the bottom 50% of Americans don’t show up in economic charts or data. The wage disparity is so high that they basically become noise on most statistics. Basically if the top 10% do well then it looks like the entire country is doing great.

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