Comment by gowld
7 days ago
That's an improper analysis.
First off, it's dollar-averaging every category, so it's not "% of income", which varies based on unit income.
Second, I could commit to spending my entire life with constant spending (optionally inflation adjusted, optionally as a % of income), by adusting quality of goods and service I purchase. So the total spending % is not a measure of affordability.
Almost everyone lifestyle ratchets, so the handful that actually downgrade their living rather than increase spending would be tiny.
This part of a wider trend too, where economic stats don't align with what people are saying. Which is most likley explained by the economic anomaly of the pandemic skewing peoples perceptions.
We have centuries of historical evidence that people really, really don’t like high inflation, and it takes a while & a lot of turmoil for those shocks to work their way through society.