Fascinating little window
- Almost 60% of respondents wrongly believe that the country is in a recession (it hasn’t been since 2020)
- 55% believe the economy is shrinking (it is growing)
- 49% say unemployment is at a 50-year high (it’s close to a 50-year low)
- 58% said the reason the economy is worsening is due to Biden’s mismanagement
Yeah. Inflation is real (Covid aftereffects and corporate greed), and in 2022 it hit this huge spike so prices are still high. As far as I can see the reasons for that had nothing to do with Biden, but I get it; it’s painful to people directly, so it’s the part of the equation that’s easy to focus on, and it’s easy to blame the guy who’s “in charge” because he’s supposed to take responsibility for things being good, whether they’re his fault originally or not.
At the same time Biden actually has done a ton of things (boosting domestic manufacturing and supporting unions through an actually-pro-labor NLRB) which have been boosting wages. A lot of it is at the lower end of the scale, so I think it’s largely invisible to Lemmy people who my guess is are largely tech workers or students or etc (as opposed to truck drivers), but the wages at the bottom have actually outpaced even the huge inflationary level.
Blaming Biden for the inflation, and pretending the wage gains didn’t happen, and pretending that Biden’s policies are neoliberal is… I mean, I get how it could look that way (again especially if you exist at the white-collar end of the scale in a tech job), but it’s definitely not what happened.
That’s good, I didn’t know that. However, that hasn’t had any affect on me, personally, as you have suggested, being a tech worker. In fact, I had to take a wage cut just for the business to survive. This whole economy is screwed in one way or another. And anytime the economy is screwed like this, it usually benefits some (typically the rich), and destroys others.
This is all considerably too complex to boil down to any one real thing to point to, but the notion of corporate greed still nags at me every single time I go to the grocery store. If prices can rise, they surely can also fall – and they simply haven’t, all while record profits are continually posted, and not for just luxury items – but for basic needs as well (groceries, etc).
This is as large a cost-of-living swing as I’ve ever seen in my many decades on this Earth. And it worries me greatly for my kid’s future.