politics

They conveniently underlined all the bullshit.

For example:

Highest rate of economic growth (reflecting even more of the wealth being distributed among the Uber wealthy)

Lowest inflation (not counting housing, healthcare, energy or food)

Strongest wage growth (maybe in nominal terms if you ignore the actual increase in the cost of essential goods and services putting people behind where they were pre-pandemic)

Biggest wage gain among lowest paid workers (who still make less than they did before 2019 and somehow overlooking that almost all the gains in the economy since 2019 went to a few specific billionaires)

Lowest unemployment in x years ( they just keep redefining unemployment so that instead of it meaning 'people who can't find enough gainful employment to pay essential bills', we limit it to people that have no job right now but did in the last six months and have made x number of applications while not collecting any income. It's a damn joke)

They say "accounting for inflation" but then you have to remember their definition of inflation does not count housing, healthcare, energy or food so it's nonsense anyway.

The wealth gap is wider now than 2018. I don't even know where this claim that people are better off or the wealth gap is shrinking comes from... oh they got a 6% raise and inflation in sensible terms (not even counting housing and healthcare but including energy and food) is close to 9%.

And the black unemployment rate much like the unemployment rate itself is a cooked number that ignores most of the people that are black and unemployed/underemployed. It just doesn't give a shit if you can eat, have a place to live or can afford to go to the doctor, it just cares if you have a job right now or if you recently did and are still looking.

I am on my phone so I haven't had a chance to look up the disability unemployment claim, but as someone that lives with and supports people with disabilities, this might actually be real. Remote work is a real social revolution and it is making lives better.

My point is, as long as articles like this used continue to use cooked books to justify rose tinted viewings they will continue to think Americans are just ungrateful and ignorant of how great things are.

Dishonest stuff like this undermines the credibility of revenue driven media and leads to blurring the lines between a community getting high on hopium and Trump's firehose of bullshit.

These articles are starting to annoy me. There's no yardstick that says "Economy: terrible <-> great". It depends on who you are, how much income you make, what kind of assets you hold, what kind of debt you hold, etc. Ask different people and you will get different answers.

If you poll congressmen regarding the health of the economy and then poll the next 100 people that walk out of your local Dollar General, you'll probably get a lot different answers.

We can talk specifics like inflation, rates of household saving, etc. but just trying to say "the economy is great/terrible" is overly reductive and doesn't really take into account the country as a whole.

I actually like Biden and still plan on voting for him, but I'm not sure I can say the economy is "good" right now, definitely not good for regular people. Just because the stock market is picking up doesn't mean shit if rent just went up 10% or food is expensive as hell everywhere you go. People are getting priced out of making a living and this shit can't go on for much longer.