Comment by WarmWash
3 hours ago
The actual problem in the US is housing costs, but most people are around social media knowledge level in this area, and just blame the first thing in front of them. Raising wages will do nothing to ease housing costs, which eat the largest chunk of everyone's pay.
It's particularly sad that we just proved this with the massive Covid-era stimulus and yet didn't collectively learn the lesson.
We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.
There is a good proportion of the planet that will look at that and say "well we just needed to write bigger checks."
I think also the ridiculous nature of the automobile market is a significant secondary problem in the US. When the median new vehicle is $49000 and the median annual salary (pretax) is ~$65,000 that isn't sustainable.