That's what's called gaming the statistics. Actual purchasing power has been declining at a significantly higher rate as wages increased the net result being you can buy less stuff for more money. Fluffy articles citing feel good statistics dont matter.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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It's the standard statistics about wages and price levels that we've been using for decades. I don't see any evidence that they're gamed, though I don't doubt that there are some people for whom what you describe is true
CPI for example likely isn't being gamed, (I hope). There have been changes to the CPI so whoever made these does have the ability to push it into a certain direction. What I meant was, for a random fluff article I simply pick any of my favorite CPI categories and spin those to suit my main point.
Which is why Krugman is using CPI, and not some random category. He's smart enough to avoid that kind of pitfall.
I started working in a grocery store about a year before the pandemic. I've seen prices of food double in some cases. My pay has only gone up $2 due to the minimum wage in my city increasing. $2 raise in almost 5 years. I can no longer afford to shop at the store I work at, it's insane. I have no idea how this article can pretend things are remotely ok for the common person. I'm sure higher ups/managers are just fine, but not the rest of us.
Wages at the bottom end of the scale haven't been ok since Reagan decided to break things. Biden hasn't managed to fix this; he was the moderate candidate who wasn't willing to break the billionaires. And even if he had been, at no time during his Presidency have we had a Congress which was willing to go back to taxing the wealthiest at rates high enough to redistribute wealth back down the ladder.
The answer to that is under no circumstances to go choose somebody in a party whose core promise is to transfer even more wealth to the richest.
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The simple reality of the past year or so is that America has accomplished what many, perhaps most, economists considered impossible: a large fall in inflation without a recession or even a big rise in unemployment.
At this point, however, with a soft landing looking ever more plausible, it seems as if the council, while it underestimated the size and duration of the shock, got the basic story right.
Unfortunately, we don’t have consumer sentiment data for the 1940s, although some political scientists believe that the economy actually helped Harry Truman win his upset election victory in 1948.
Also, it seems worth noting that many voters have demonstrably false views about the current economy — believing, in particular, that unemployment, which is near a 50-year low, is actually near a 50-year high.
And everything we know from history suggests that trying to impose deflation — falling prices — on large parts of the economy would have had disastrous effects on employment and output, something like the quiet depression Britain inflicted on itself after World War I when it tried to go back to the prewar gold standard.
What I can say is that if you believe that Biden made huge, obvious economic policy mistakes and could easily have put himself in a much better position, you probably haven’t thought this thing through.
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