Didn't the child poverty rate jump because so many had just been lifted out of it because of the expanded child tax credit? And similarly with medicaid, wasn't that because of the expanded coverage due to covid? (In other words Democrats did good things but now don't have enough seats in the Senate/Congress to keep those temporary measures permanent?)
Just seem like weird choices. "We fixed these things, Republicans broke them, the economy must be nonsense!"
I'm very disappointed that nobody in the media bothers with follow up questions.
"The economy is booming!"
"For who?" For Joe 'I own a yacht' Manchin? Yeah, I'm sure it is.
This goes back decades now with politicians on both the right and left claiming to support "middle class tax cuts" and nobody asks "how do you define 'middle class'?"
https://www.newsweek.com/tax-cuts-republicans-middle-class-trump-701094
"House Republicans issued a fact sheet about their new tax cut plan that referred to Americans earning $450,000 a year as "low- and middle-income"—even though that income level would put those taxpayers in the top 0.5 percent of all individual Americans.
The median household income in the United States is $59,039, after all."
I’m an avid planet money podcast listener, but a recent episode pissed me off so much. They were asking why consumer sentiment is so bad when all the economic news was good. It’s like they don’t pay attention to how most leading economic indicators are nothing more than a barometer of how rich people are doing. They expect us to be happy that inflation has slowed, even though prices are still high and it took high interest rates to do it (something that punishes poor borrowers but rewards rich investors). They expect us to be happy unemployment is low when jobs pay horribly.
Okay, first:
People got 'thrown off' Medicaid because it was temporarily expanded under the pandemic, and lots of the people that qualified under the expansion no longer qualify now that it's expired. Yeah, I'm in favor of Medicaid for all--or Medicare, I can't keep them straight--but this is disingenuous.
Second, 45M people in 1.8T student loan debt is a problem, sure, but who keeps blocking forgiving that debt? If you think that not voting for the guy that did everything in his power to cancel that debt is going to fix that problem, well, you probably shouldn't have gone to higher ed. in the first place, because it didn't help your critical thinking skills.
Is the economy we have now--under a Democratic president, with a Democratic Senate and a very slim Republican majority in the House--better or worse than it would be under a Republican (Trump) president, Republican Senate, and Republican House? Do you really think that all of the things listed in this short, misleading blurb would be fixed if Biden loses the election? Do you think that your protest vote for a Green or Dem Soc candidate is going to improve anything, given that we don't have ranked-choice voting in national elections?
What’s the point of this statement? Both groups of things can be true. The economy of the US, as a whole, can be booming while simultaneously having those other things be true too. The economy isn’t a measure of how individuals are doing. It’s a measure of how well the bullshit of capitalism is working. Seems to be working as intended…
It's not by chance that in big countries official economic numbers are listed for the country as whole (independently of the number of people) or at best using the arithmetic average for per-capita numbers rather than the mode.
Countrywide numbers sound great until you merelly divide it by the number of people (i.e. the average, which still has problems) were for example the US falls from #1 in wealth to #15 in wealth per person.
Further, it's way too common for governing politicians in countries with strong population growth to only talk about total economic numbers, because total country GDP will grow simply from adding more working adults (due to immigration or higher birth rates) even if it's actually falling per-capita (if, for example, the working adults added have lower productivity) hence the economic position of most people is getting worse.
As for arithmetic averages, they suffer from not really representing the experience of most people when there is high inequality. For example, if there are 10 people, 1 with 10 chickens and 9 with zero chickens, that average tells us each has 1 chicken whilst in reality most people's chicken-ownership experience is of having non chickens. The mode would tell it's zero chickens because that what most individuals have.
And don't get me started on the actual ways to rig official economic figures (such as understating Official Inflation, which because of how it's produced results in a higher Official GDP number)
For at least 2 decades now, Official Economic Figures have been complete total bollocks, and you should be especially suspicious of the figures quoted by government politicians as (as I explained above) they're generally cherry-picking and presenting figures which bare little resemblance to what's happenning for most people.
It is, though. Wealth and power are concentrating at the top of megacorporations and billionaires and bringing in record profits, just as they're supposed to under capitalism.
I'm guessing since gas prices are down they have to talk about real economic strife.
It's not like that money is disappearing. Why are the 99% of the population it gets taken away from so selfish? Can't they just be happy for the few rich entities who profit from taking away their livelihoods, stripping them of their last shirt and draining them dry until they are bankrupt? Doesn't the promise of maybe later being trickled down upon make them happy? It's bound to happen one of these decades...
The stock market is a meat grinder
You don't understand: it's the creative destruction. Yes, people are destroyed, but that's a sccrifice the rich are willing to make.
Obligatory Average Human Welfare
"They" is just another corporate machine. It's not for us, it just pretends to be. "Booming" is just a reflection of the current stock bump, unemployment lows and analyst predictions because that's all a corporate machine would know about. It could just as easily turn around next week to "recession lights blinking" or some other nonsense. You can pretty safely just ignore all that trash at this point.
they're trying to convince other rich goons more than us
🎶 BBC talkin' 'bout the GDP That means fuck all to me 🎶 - Bob Vylan
Default Country, obviously.
We've had development indexes for decades, but nobody cares: https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks
The economy doing well doesn’t mean out of control capitalists stop price gouging the fuck out of anything and everything
This post is fucking brain dead
"We NeEd To RaIsE taXeS"
Gotta love when liberals get angry at you for challenging the narrative that the economy is doing great because they are terrified of Trump winning... and they think trying to gaslight people (who by and large are pretty desperate right now) into thinking the economy is doing great is the best strategy to get Biden elected.
Nope, you just make democrats come off as a condescending assholes who are out of touch.
Can't wait until they blame progressives again for losing ("So JUST because Biden is the most crucial international supporter/enabler of a genocide and won't do anything meaningful about it means you aren't going to vote for him???!?? You people are the problem").
