Comment by steveBK123
1 day ago
Real wages (inflation adjusted) for the lower 50% went up faster than they have since pre-Reagan era.
So while inflation hurts the bottom more than the top, because they spend a higher % of income, they were compensated for it.
The problem is that across the spectrum, when people got raises they went "wow I'm so good at my job and hard working and smart" and when eggs/gas prices went up they went "the president is a bad man and bad at high job".
Sort of like all the stimulus, payroll protection, unemployment benefit increases/extensions, rent/mortgage/student loan moratoriums during COVID that went on well past the point where economy was at risk, and people still ended up angrier than they did post GFC.
The amounts of money and different ways money was thrown at people by the government 2020-2021 was historically abnormal and we got more mass unrest than when huge swathes of country were losing their homes and out of a job for years during GFC.
It makes me wonder what a government can actually do that doesn't lead to backlash.
I didn't get a penny. No PPP, didn't qualify for any other protection, stimulus payments, etc. I'm not complaining, I did okay.
The perception was that the money was being thrown to business owners that instead bought multiple exotic European luxury cars.
A government could tax wealth.
You talk about minor wage increases or payroll protection as if this actually benefits the people receiving these benefits. It does on paper, sure, but governments haven't been paying for this through taxes. They've been paying for it by printing money, which devalues money (mostly held by normal people in the bottom X% of society) in favour of assets like houses and stock (mostly held by the top (100-X)% of society). This is a de facto transfer of wealth from normal people to rich and ultra-rich asset owners. Not to mention most of this money goes towards replacing money lost to asset owners anyway - if you make $X, you get fired and the government prints $X to cover that, your relative position is the same, but someone up the food chain from you has just made $X.
This kind of thing drives up asset prices. For the US specifically, house prices have gone up by over 50% since January 2020 (per every index I can find), the S&P 500 has gone up by around 125% (!), the price of gold by around 80%, etc.
Meanwhile, the SSA's National Average Wage Index has gone up 19% since 2020.
If you have a huge portfolio of stocks and REITs and gold, that's great news. If you're a normal person who maybe aspires to one day stop paying rent, this is terrible news. Of course people are upset!
> they were compensated for it.
That's a very questionable assumption.
Many people have criticized the CPI and inflation rate as an inaccurate measure of the cost of living. Housing prices are crazy in many areas. I think you're exaggerating about the affect of egg prices specifically on voter behavior. And with any average or median, there are often vastly different outcomes for different people who are not exactly average.
> when people got raises they went "wow I'm so good at my job and hard working and smart"
This feels like a straw man.
> when eggs/gas prices went up they went "the president is a bad man and bad at high job".
This also feels like a straw man, and the phrasing is quite condescending.
> people still ended up angrier than they did post GFC
Did they? After all, the 2008 Presidential election during the financial crisis was kind of a blowout in favor of the opposition party against the incumbent party. Whereas 2020 and 2024 were closer elections.
“ Many people have criticized the CPI and inflation rate as an inaccurate measure of the cost of living. Housing prices are crazy in many areas”
Do you have any ‘real’ inflation measures that show that the middle and lower middle class didn’t improve more in that period than any time since pre-Reagan? I’ve looked and can’t find any but am definitely not an economist.
It’s well studied that grocery and gas prices have an outsized impact on consumer sentiment going back a very long time, what’s new is there seems to be a disconnect between economic outcomes, consumer sentiment and consumer behaviors.
I think it’s going to be a huge point of study to figure out why people thought they were doing worse than they were but continued to spend like things were rosy.
> Do you have any ‘real’ inflation measures that show that the middle and lower middle class didn’t improve more in that period than any time since pre-Reagan?
I wasn't disputing that specifically.
> I think it’s going to be a huge point of study to figure out why people thought they were doing worse than they were
Here's a recent article by a former US Comptroller who argues that people weren't wrong:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-...
> continued to spend like things were rosy.
I think that's a strange way of putting it.
In general, I wouldn't take election outcomes to be a reflection of some cultural zeitgeist. Elections happen in the US on a single day, and if the election were held again today, the outcome might be different. In any case, the elections are usually quite close, depending on small percentages in battleground states. Little movements can make a big difference. My own state of Wisconsin has had a margin of victory of under 1% for the past 3 Presidential elections.
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Where were the mass demonstrations in 2008-2010? Sure OWS happened, and I was able to see it up close.. but this was nothing compared to summer 2020.
Why did no one storm the capitol in 2008/2012?
Why didn't crime shoot up and stay up for 2-3 years then?
Etc.
I'm at a loss here, because these all seem like red herrings. What do the George Floyd protests and the Capitol storming have to do with inflation, employment, and the cost of living?
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Sociologist buddy told me few years back (during the first Trump term) they had survey data showing the anger is not economy related. When its jobs and inequality related people tend to move left more than right. More likely it was GFC/Iraq-Afg/Snowden-Assange/social media generated dysfunction/metoo/blm etc etc getting seen as some kind of attack on American identity, the kind of stuff that pushes people right.
But either way Govt is not magic. It has to react to a very complex uncontrollable ever changing reality. There will be oscillations between periods of calm and chaos.
But lots of people were losing their jobs and put out of their homes during the pandemic.
Prices rose sharply for everyone. We got roughly $2000 of individual stimulus payments over the course of ~2 years. Doesn't pay for a hell of a lot over that span.
And the increases in real wages were very uneven. If you happened to be one of the lucky ones whose wages were increased, then that's great—but many, many people's stayed the same at best. And, again, many people were fired, or quit because the alternative was putting themselves in constant physical danger plus being screamed at by people who value their own minor convenience over your life.
And as someone with a family member who was on unemployment after losing their job in the summer of 2020, if we had had to rely on it to pay the bills, regardless of how long it lasted, we would have been screwed. (And that's ignoring all the hoops they had to go through just to get and keep it.)
What could the government have done that wouldn't lead to (as much) backlash[0] from ordinary people? Well, how about
- Provide stimulus that actually keeps people afloat over a long period, rather than just tossing $2000 at them and declaring that should be enough
- Provide complete and effective PPE for everyone who has to be working during the lockdowns
- Put in place robust protections for the health and safety of both those workers (ie, protection against employers who want you to endanger yourself) and everyone else (ie, mandating masks in enclosed public spaces, mandating vaccines, strengthening requirements for good ventilation, etc)
In general, if the government were not hamstrung by having roughly half its legislators actively seeking to make government less effective to justify dismantling it and privatizing everything, it would be able to provide for its people in a more compassionate and comprehensive way.
[0] And yes; I'm aware there would be backlash against these things from right-wing science deniers. They were never a majority.