News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
An element to this is that there are a lot of different statistics that can tell a lot of different stories depending on what bits of data you pick.
For instance, most people would probably say that the average person had less purchasing power in October of this year compared to October of 2022. They would actually be wrong, as inflation-adjusted hourly wages have actually increased slightly in that time period (by ten cents, admittedly, but the fact remains that wage growth has been outpacing inflation).
This does not mean that every person has seen a growth in purchasing power, and my loose understanding is that most of the growth has been occurring at the bottom of the labor market (which is arguably a good thing from an equity standpoint).
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/realer.pdf
I completely agree that it's not going to win votes. I think the takeaway is that the average consumer is not a particularly rational actor (much to the chagrin of economists), and your messaging needs to address the actual source of their frustrations, which may very well be the mere fact that the numbers got higher even though their purchasing power hasn't actually decreased.
I'd emphasize how you said that the average Americas is clearly not feeling the benefit, because I think that holds a really key part of this. Consumer sentiment does not necessarily track actual data, whether they're high level metrics like GDP or more individual ones like inflation-adjusted wages.
So (excepting that the alternative is Trump for a minute) you’re thinking a rational actor should vote for the guy improving the economy for lower wage workers even if it didn’t benefit them individually?
I don’t hate that take.
I do think the formula we american kids were taught in school was more like
Individuals vote in their selfish interests
Selfish votes are tallied and hopefully if you average out people’s self-interested votes they elect a guy who is acting in the interests of a decent subset.
Americans don’t generally think in golden rule terms like “Whatever benefits the most workers is best for the country.”
I’d personally have to be shown evidence that a sizable portion of all these excessive (compared to manufacturing costs) profits are NOT lining the pockets of the rich before I would give out any economics gold stars.
Honestly, if people were rational actors about economics, they'd stop thinking the President can do much about how they feel about the economy. And using Gas prices as the measure is one of the most asinine things I've ever seen.