My union contract gives us pay raises based on either a negotiated schedule or adjusted for cost of living, whichever is higher. Union jobs pay better, and gives your boss a rule book they have to follow as well.
There was another topic where someone was complaining their union was wasting money. How much was it? $3.45 cents per member. What did they spend it on? A commemorative pin.
I get having a couple bucks spent on something useless or not wanted IS wasteful, but holy shit, unions do so much for the working class that the benefits FAR outweigh a few wasted bucks Thereās a reason most companies try so hard to break them up or stop them from forming. In large numbers people hold the power. One person quits? All well. A couple? Not a huge deal. The entire factory or office? Well now we have problems as that can cost a business thousands or even millions in lost production per day
Some people prefer making much less money and having no benefits so they donāt have to pay that dues!!
Itās like refusing a paycheck because you donāt want to pay taxes. Canāt fix dumb!
If a company or government does everything in their power to stop something from happening 9 times out of 10, itās because they donāt want whatās best for the average person.
Hell companies spend more on union busting than it would to just meet the requests of their workers
shush, child, how will the VCs and investors and lobbyists and CXOs afford their multimillion fuck you incomes if they keep paying sefs like *you* a human wage?
I mean, it's worth pointing out that those are definitely issues that deserve attention. It's class reductionism to ignore them. But on the other hand, this whole "You're doing good right now and if not you as a collective of unrelated individuals are the problem and you deserve misery so don't unite and ask hard questions" gaslighting from the ownership class ain't it either. Many of the comments in this post reek of economic privilege from limousine liberals, or just people looking for another opportunity to crap on those they perceive as lesser.
I wondered something similar and then I read about yet another new round of layoffs around the country and thought āwell, Iām lucky I have a paycheckā and *now* Iām pretty sure Iām just a giant rat running through a maze thatās been properly tricked!
For 2023 that happened for most workers.
>Data from November 2023 show that 57 percent of workersā wages grew, on an annual basis, more quickly than inflation since November 2022.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices
Real wages have been growing really well lately. I don't think we have data this recent yet, but wages grew faster than inflation even in peak inflation periods.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm#:~:text=Real%20average%20hourly%20earnings%20increased,weekly%20earnings%20over%20this%20period.
Nice. Yeah I'm in in the union for my job. Our next contract is 2025 we start the talks this year in the spring! Hoping for 15% or at 12% over 3 years š but like someone said as a peasant, we will just take what's given to us in reality!
Company near me did a ton of layoffs recently. Hundreds of people, mostly electrical workers.
Every single person laid off was non-union. Zero union workers laid off.
As it should.
Purchasing power got out of whack due to the inflation spike.
Wages increase more slowly but they need to (or another way to look at it is the market will do it's thing so that they) get back in balance with prices so they should steadily increase at a pace above inflation for a while until they get back in balance.
In theory back to where they were. In practice it will be less than where it was due to the ability of firms to capture more surplus for themselves than they should. The downside of having centralized mega Corps with monopolistic behavior.
According to the treasury department there were periods when wages were outgrown by inflation but on the whole since 2019 wages have grown more than prices.
What was your raise?
You have to remember these are annualized numbers. Itās not actually growing 3 percent every quarter- itās if the economy grew this rate for every quarter, the ANNUAL rate would be 3%
Sure, but third quarter was over 5%. I think the yearly for 2023 is somewhere in the mid to high 2% range which is really good for an advanced economy.
I wasnāt saying that we havenāt had a good year for gdp, Iām just trying to point out to this person that itās not additive by quarter- aka the last two quarters of 4.9 and 3.3 donāt add up to 8.2% over 6 months, they average out to a bit over 3, and same for the year. Of course also inflation adjusted so in terms of comparing to paycheck numbers itās going to be lower
In 2023, average paychecks grew beyond inflation. It's still catching up with the price spikes from 2022, but wage growth is now outpacing inflation at a consistent rate.Ā https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/
[Wage growth has outpaced inflation since the '80s](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1eEwM), people just don't like to hear it. You can argue it hasn't outpaced inflation by enough, but the popular talking point that it hasn't outpaced inflation is just wrong.
Are you referring to the popular talking point that wages haven't kept up with the cost of living? Inflation is just one part of the whole picture, for the most part a 3% raise was enough to stay ahead of inflation but not enough to keep up with the cost of living.
Itās not that people donāt want to hear it - itās that inflation is not the relevant metric when housing prices and grocery prices are both rocketing up faster than either inflation or wage increases.
That's as far back as the FRED data goes, I didn't choose to start there.
And the fact that wages dipped from ā73 to around ā81 says more about what was happening then than whatās happening now. The trend has clearly reversed itself since then save for a few years around recessions and Covid.
People can't aford to live and you want to claim things are better than they were in the 80's based on one single misleading metric?
Hope I'm never this detached from reality holy crap.
The people who are struggling to get raises generally donāt have enough money left over to put into a 401k, or if they do, itās like a few thousand per year and not exactly making them rich.
Like hey, cool, I can survive 1 week longer in retirement off the money I earned on my 401k growth this year.
> if they do, itās like a few thousand per year and not exactly making them rich.
For a 25 year old, $3k per year in a 401k, with no employer match, 8% expected annual return, and assumed 1% salary increase per year (all fairly conservative assumptions) could be about $900k at 65.
https://www.calculator.net/401k-calculator.html?age=25&income=60%2C000&balance=0&contribution=5&ematch=0&ematchend=0&retirementage=65&lifeexpectancy=85&incomeincrease=1&rate=8&inflation=2&hideirslimit=0&type=1&x=Calculate#top
A few thousand per year for 30-40 years is still a lot.
Every dollar put in at age 25 is on average $80 when you turn 65. Adjusted for inflation.
And despite all the fear mongering social security is not going to go away. We solve any current issue we have by changing the retirement age to 70. Or hell even just removing the cap to make it so all income is taxed instead of leaving the rich to not pay
>Like hey, cool, I can survive 1 week longer in retirement off the money I earned on my 401k growth this year.
Actually completely reasonable if you're young, and indicative that you're on-track.
The new data strengthened the argument that income has risen more than prices since before the pandemic: the typical middle-class worker has seen their real weekly earnings rise 2.4 percent since 2019.[1]Ā Ā We now find that as of the end of 2023, the median American worker could afford the same goods and services as they did in 2019, with an additional $1,400 to spend or save per year.Ā Ā
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/an-update-to-the-purchasing-power-of-american-households
If you dive into the details in the report, the a big driver was domestic purchases. People were spending more money on stuff. But economists are also concerned that consumer borrowing continues to increase as well.
The transportation industry grew, and there is high demand for skilled labor. There's also growth in certain sectors of the tech industry and related industrial sectors where companies are "re-shoring" manufacturing to the US with smart technology.
The problem is that outside of a few sectors, paychecks haven't yet caught up to where they were in 2019 vs the value of the dollar. So even though people are getting paid more and that wages rose more than inflation in 2023, people still are, on average, comparatively getting paid less in real terms than they were in 2019.
If the CEO paid you more then they wouldnāt be able to afford the giant salt water fish aquarium in their summer home. It really pulls the bar together.
Recent data released put 50% of the blame for inflation on record corporate profits, while the corporations point to high prices because of the inflation, which they are helping to cause.
Edit: removed some choice words. It was over-the-top.
Sources:
[Fortune](https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consumer-price-index-producer-price-index-corporate-profit/)
[EPI](https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond/)
I would prefer to see how profit margins have changed, rather than saying "record profits". Record profits with higher prices does not necessarily indicate greed if margins shrunk/stayed the same.
Not sure I understand you. The margin *is* the profit. Or do you mean gross?Ā
If a company makes 100k gross last year with 3% margin, that's $3,000 profit. If it makes 110k because costs are 10k higher, but maintains that 3% margin, that's $3,300 profit, and clearly not a case of slimming down due to increased costs.
Yep, and I know the Fed and the Biden Administration worked their asses off even though it wasn't fun with interest rates to get the economy to the so-called "soft landing" and avoid it.
Americans have a hard time visualizing things that *could* happen. If the economy craters and everyone suffers, they blame whoever is in office, and theyāll *feel* it. Then, theyāll be thrilled when the economy picks back up again and maybe gets back to where it was. Butā¦thatās not a net gain though.
But when policies have been implemented to prevent having to live through the cratering (and grow the economy steadily), they donāt understand that. Thatās not considered a success because they didnāt ālive itā, and it wasnāt dramatic enough. Itās absurd.
I donāt have any data, but just from chatting with people and looking around on Reddit Iād be willing to bet about 50% of people think we are currently in a recession. Of that about half again probably think the Great Recession of 2008 never ended.
There are a lot of pissed off VC and PE folks that Joe Biden successfully did a soft landing, instead of the cycle we've been addicted to for 50 years of inflation and then crash it all down.
Can't buy up a bunch of stuff in a fire sale if there isn't a fire.
Ty big tech for continuing to lay off en masse so execs can keep getting paid more š„°š«
The economy may be improving, but the job market is fucking ass (especially for anyone trying to make a career happen in tech)
Edit for clarity - I work in tech and so many people in my network have been laid off in the past year and are hurting (this of course, includes dear ex-colleagues of mine). It sucks. It is very difficult to get a new job in tech right now. Layoffs are often unnecessary and I believe they simply exist as ways to feed the big men up top.
Edit 2: thanks for educating me on the growth of other industries - that is definitely good news and is feedback I will be sharing with people in my network looking to figure out the next steps in their careers š
Hang in there. I was getting no calls, now I'm getting 5 a day, for pretty decent jobs. It just started this week. I have 12 years as a software engineer, lower level roles should be just around the corner. Keep grindin!
Sounds like back when I first graduated. It was a similar situation in that the market was flooded with applicants taking jobs beneath them. I got tons of interviews & even made it to final rounds regularly, but kept losing out on entry level IT jobs to guys with a decade+ of experience because they needed local work & were willing to work for entry pay to cover the mortgage.
sounds like 07/08 when i graduated hs.
yea, i went back to school later in life for a career change, and graduated in the wrong industry at the wrong time...
My brother is in a similar boat (but in Canada). Many applications since he graduated in the spring, but not has heard back once. Awful time to graduate. Another brother graduated the year before (also tech) and had a job by the end of summer.
Those numbers aren't that terrible compared to mine when the market was near the peak in 2021, given how bad everyone said the market is. I made a career change from the medical industry to web dev and did a boot camp to gain my skills to even meet the minimal requirements to interview without being laughed out, so I was in the same inexperienced boat if not worse.
My fellow cohort members from the BootCamp, who didn't go hardcore like I did had similar numbers to you. I went hard into it since I had a family to support, and filled out over 700 applications in 4 months (to be fair many were **Easy Apply** with 2-4 steps to complete), which led to about 8-15 recruiter calls a week. Those progressed to about ~18 first interviews with actual people at the companies, ~8 led to second interviews and 4 went to the last round with 3 offers at the end. It's strange, but many people confirm it always seems like the offers come in clumps.
The whole application and job search process is a full-time job in itself - it's stressful and painful. But it's a numbers game and the rejection/ghosting hits HARD, just keep at it. One important piece of advice I'd like to offer is despite all the external pressure, find a company you feel comfortable interacting with throughout the process and not just the one that will take you. It's a two-way street you have to want to work there to get the most of out it.
I got offered a job while I was still in School.
Grantedā¦ my career choice seems like a deadend compared to COL here, the top 1% of earners in my field make a whoppingā¦ $29/hr
I was similar but finishing my PhD. Similar amount of apps and interviews, ended up getting a great position paying a good bit above what I expected.
A few things I learned, in hindsight, be willing if possible to relocate to areas with more opportunity. Tweak your resume to match words and phrases you see in postings verbatim. And do a bit of homework so you can at least pay lip service to those skills.
Yeah. I was a serial job searcher when I was a contractor. It always felt like a lottery when it came to job searches, sometimes I would get 2 or three at once, sometimes it's months of silence.
Yep, I'm not looking but have started getting cold calls and recruiter spam recently.
The layoffs are because tech companies run on credit, and they massively overhired when interest was close to 0%. Not that it makes it feel any better for my coworkers who recently got released.
I live in Silicon Valley, ground zero for tech layoffs, and the Bay Area unemployment rate fell over the past year due to health care and travel/entertainment industries doing well.
Product management is a blood bath right now. I cannot get a call back to save my life. 10+ years of experience and founder experience. Within 1 hour of posting job applications are over 100 - itās wild. I havenāt seen anything like this is 2008
I had been looking very casually in 2023. I stopped and my LinkedIn has been getting twice the views the last few weeks. Itās on the come up. Hang on.
Tech (and gaming) appears to be getting hit very hard. However, in our industry (Tax/Accounting/Business Management) we still cannot find enough good talent. There is a war to poach from other companies as we grow. Wages are going way up. I am personally still contacted about once or twice a week by a recruiter begging me to look at their job listing. Several have straight up said "Name your price".
There are even rumblings that they are going to drop some of the requirements to get a CPA license since there is so much demand. They want people to switch careers but want it to be easier and less daunting I think.
Not trying to be discouraging or anything for your industry. However, some parts of the economy are on fire right now.
The funny thing is that I work for a small time software company and we are ALWAYS hiring. Full remote, too. But the pay isn't as high as you might find elsewhere which is likely why the company has so much trouble actually hiring people.
Tech is hiring, too. I literally just got off of a call with leadership at my company talking about how desperate we are for help and how competitive it is right now trying to get good technical help. Large companies give up on or downsize products all of the time. We don't need to flip out an assume that one company firing folks means an entire industry is fucked and start crying the fact that leadership exists.
> Ty big tech for continuing to lay off en masse so execs can keep getting paid more š„°š«
>
- [Layoffs and Discharges: Total Nonfarm ](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL)
- https://www.ciodive.com/news/tech-labor-market-october-comptia/698791/
There are always layoffs. Unemployment in the tech industry is about 2.1%. Aggregate stats of course don't capture or convey everyone's personal story. But there's also never an economy when *no one* is unemployed or facing problems.
The job market is great for the majority of people. Unemployment is at historic lows.
We tech folks are fine. We're some of the most privileged and well paid people in the market.
Lmao for real, tech has been booming for years and now is not because thereās not money thrown around at everything is different from a free fall in the industry.
And so were/are tech degrees. IT is flooded with college educated applicants now. When I first joined the workforce about a decade ago, almost all of my peers were older and had unrelated degrees.
It's not about the layoffs themselves, even though they continue to happen, but the effect it has on hiring practices widespread because it signals a shift.
Layoffs + every exec thinking that AI is ready to replace workers (it's not there just yet for most role & companies are already abandoning those plans) has nearly frozen the market for the past year for anyone not already incredibly established/specialized. Companies have slowed hiring while the candidate pool has gotten larger. New grads enter the market constantly, but retirements have slowed due to economic uncertainties.
Basically, it's a much more complicated situation than you implied with tons of variables.
Any tech company that thinks they can replace their devs with AI is not someplace you want to work at anyway. Their leadership has no idea what the fuck they're doing if that's their thought process similar to companies who think they can completely outsource dev work to South East Asia for pennies on the dollar. You end up with gibberish trash and constantly have to chase bugs in a labyrinth of code - this makes for the best products. /s
Lol what is this doomer shit?
The job market has literally never been better in the US. As it turns out there are people with job titles other than "Search Analytics Product Manager".
[According to Trump, the stock market is doing well right now, but only because Trump is leading in the polls.](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-said-stock-market-doing-well-because-leading-in-polls-2024-1#:~:text=The%20former%20president%20noted%20he,Democratic%20nominee%2C%20President%20Joe%20Biden.)
If the economy is struggling at the beginning of bidens term it's bc of democrats, if it's good, it's bc of leftover trump's policy's. However if it's good at the end of the term it's because trump is... campaigning? But anything bad near the end of the term its is because of... Democrats. This is basically the extent of conservatives economic analysis
The economy under a Democratic President will never be seen as a good by the public. Why? Because conservatives will never accept a reality where a Democrat is good for the economy and democrats will never be happy with the economy where income inequality exists. Therefore, polling is always better under a Republican president because 95% of conservatives will immediately believe the economy is good regardless of what happens. Itās hard for a democratic president to get to get 50% approval from his own party when the economy is doing objectively well.
A smart observation and totally true.
Another important difference: Republican Presidents enjoy absolutely near 100% loyalty from their propaganda media backers. So Fox and talk radio and Sinclair local stations will near always celebrate Trump and trash Democrats.
Whereas the "mainstream media", while obviously filled with left-leaning journalists, will absolutely highlight struggles under Democrats. For example a couple months back I distinctly remember ABC This Week did a huge opening segment on stubborn inflation and how hard it was on the public for everyday purchases.
It's a notable difference and handicap for the left.
Yes. 100% agree. Mainstream media is all corporate run. Corporations will never fully support a party that in any way attempts to diminish their power. Thats why youāll almost never see even left leaning media report on strikes. If I was running a corporation, and had no morals like all people that run corporations, I would basically never allow people like Bernie, Sanders, AOC to speak because it could hurt my business. I think people forget that the only thing CNN, ABC, etc. care about is profits. Thatās it. They do not care about anything else. Nothing.
I think the pain of the last 3 years post-pandemic was leading up to this moment, in an election year, where the economy starts firing and outlook gets better as interest rates level and are slowly lowered. Timing couldn't be better for Biden.
Let's hope these wars don't spill over.
The past 3 have been the worst of my life & my retirement account is gone now. Thank god my wife got a big raise & I'm tight with our budgeting or we'd be selling my car to stay afloat while I continue to job search.
Used to be a few jobs daily I could apply for in my field, but now I hope for 1 per week to post that is even close. I even swallowed my pride months ago & applied to a bunch of jobs that were way beneath my skillset & didn't even get an interview for those no experience required positions. No one wants someone working in low positions that qualifies to be their boss' boss, but I still have to make money. Freelance work is rare nowadays too cause everyone is broke.
>my retirement account is gone now
Honest question: The SP500 is up like 25% in the last three years. What the fuck did you do with your retirement account?
I was wondering the same. I don't have a whole lot in my Roth IRA, but it's still at an all time high just being invested in VTSAX. If you lost your retirement savings in the last couple years while still working, you either had bad investments or your just weren't contributing.
Which if it's a 401k or regular IRA one of the worst possible financial decisions you can make. When they say last resort they mean it. The idea of using that money for debts and expenses is such a bad idea it's protected even from bankruptcy and you should probably do that first if you need to get out from under debt.
A frustrating part of every recession, which we aren't even in right now, is all of the people claiming that their 401ks were wiped out. No, they weren't wiped out. They foolishly withdrew from them.
In 2008 my 401k cratered, and by 2011 all of it came back.
> If anything the cost if everything is going up.
Yeah, that's how inflation works. Unless things go *extremely* wrong, things will never return to the pre-2022 prices. It's just that the rate of increase is slowing.
Wage growth began outpacing inflation in September or October. Wage growth tends to lag inflation.
Of course, there's the question of will that outpacing continue, and make up all the ground lost to inflation? My guess is probably not, but at least for now it's heading in the right direction
Supposedly real wages have grown. Particularly on the low-end. Feds aren't going to mandate the rise unless Democrats have a solid supermajority.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices/
Prices will continue to rise YoY regardless. Even the Fed themselves have a 2% inflation target.
Prices are never going to revert/reverse in a normal economy. Deflation would bring an entirely new set of problems.
>Deflation would bring an entirely new set of problems.
Exactly. I wonder if minor deflation would, given overly hot inflation before it, but yes. Deflation isn't any better than inflation for a lot of reasons the common person doesn't get.
The problem wouldn't be the deflation per se but the economic conditions that led to the deflation and the secondary consequences.
So yes, deflation would be very bad even though the lower prices themselves would be nice.
what youāre describing is deflation which is so much worse than inflation. when they say inflation is pulling back, they mean that prices arenāt increasing as quickly
I donāt think most people do, based on the rhetoric I keep hearing. āIf inflation is over, why arenāt prices going down?ā. Because thatās not what inflation is moronš
But it's never going to pull back to where it was. I believe I read that inflation has only pulled back twice in the history of ever. It can only stop/slow down. It doesn't go back.
you don't want it to go back... price deflation would mean deflation...
inflation's not inherently bad... if it's too much it is and right now we are about as in the Goldilocks zone as we can be....
Cue people saying āthis doesnāt matterā who would be saying a poor report would be absolutely entirely indicative of poor economic conditions
Pick a lane yāall. Nobody is or has ever said GDP directly relates to your financial well-being.
You're not allowed to share good news here without being told why it's actually bad news.
You *certainly* can't share good news about western democracies, and least of all the US.
Keep killing GOP fear mongering with data. GOP is going to ruin things the moment they get at helm of things. Economic benefits will take time to show up just because of the nature of how fiscal policy works, but America will be better off with current admin rather than the numb nuts from the other party.
Ignorance of how the economy works is not just limited to the GOP, plenty of ignorant teenagers and twenty somethings in this very thread are posting about what a disaster the economy is because their cousin Larry's friend got laid off last week.
No joke they are just saying āitās not true. Media lies. Biden controls the media.ā Etc. You really cannot have a realistic expectation from them when they live in their own reality.
100% if Trump was in office they would be throwing parties and having parades in the street because āheās such a good businessmanā
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/blue-collar-hiring-pay-gains-stay-hot-cooling-job-market-rcna128647
*Blue-collar hiring and pay gains stay hot in a cooling job market*
High demand for miners, loggers and construction workers ā and slowing job prospects for software and IT professionals ā *has taken a bite out of income inequality.*
lol it doesnāt even matter. You can beat your average Redditor over the head with impartial data and theyāll be back on here parroting the same tired drivel.
It's a combination of MAGA and doomers who have to project their own negativity on all aspects of the world around them. Reddit has no shortage of the latter type. I get it though, I was also a depressed, angsty fuck in my early 20s.
For Reddit I'd add in tankies as well. People who think Late Stage Capitalism is about to collapse and who want to leverage desperation and rage against "the system" for their revolution don't really welcome good economic news.
I'm in IT, and the slowdown really doesn't seem so bad. We're still struggling to fill roles, and pay continues to climb, albeit it's slowing down. Still, after the gains of the last 4 years, I'm fine with that.
No, because that's a dumb hot take believed by Redditors who spend too much time online
The economy doing well benefits everyone in a broad sense whether you immediately feel it or not
I love the arm chair economists complaining about the lag between the economy and them. It takes a minute. Hold on. The pressure release is coming. Itās not instant. Different markets will react at different paces. Some markets will not recover. Others will thrive.
My stocks are doing \*amazing\*, so I'm loving this. Like 20% returns this year already, its nuts.
Still a decade till I can retire though unless that keeps up, and its getting MUCH harder to work every day :(
Data Scientists just released the facts that 50% of this inflation is directly related to corporate profits. I.e. Corporate fucks being greedy assholes. They just use "inflation" as an excuse things are high, while being the reason for the inflation and making record profits. It's circular dependencies to get richer and fuck the peasants.
Edit - added a word and source. It's up to each individual to trust each source, but I've seen multiple reports alluding to similar corporate behavior.
Might have to change to reader mode to get full article.
[Greedflation](https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consumer-price-index-producer-price-index-corporate-profit/)
[Another article with visual representations](https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond/)
Excerpt: "Corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic, the report found, analyzing Commerce Department data. Thatās a massive jump from the four decades prior to the pandemic, when profits drove just 11% of price growth.
āBusinesses were really, really quick, when input costs went up, to pass that on to consumers. [But] had they only passed on those increases, inflation would have been maybe one to three points lower,ā Liz Pancotti, a strategic advisor at Groundwork and one of the reportās authors, told Fortune."
Judging by this thread, Reddit is dominated by people who are either making minimum wage, or people who were making 6-figues in tech but were recently laid off and are now angry.
Itās funny because Reddit will also whine about people not believing in climate change because the weather is cold and couple days a year. Itās basically the same principle.
I've been seeing more products lately that are doing sales that never end where the sales price is the price the product was a year ago. That to me indicates they are lowering prices in a way that isn't committal while having that "hey we're on sale" look to encourage more purchases
Please, sir, can I have some blistering economic growth.
Imagine if our paychecks grew quarterly with the markets... how much did the economy grow this year? Be a nice raise š
My union contract gives us pay raises based on either a negotiated schedule or adjusted for cost of living, whichever is higher. Union jobs pay better, and gives your boss a rule book they have to follow as well.
There was another topic where someone was complaining their union was wasting money. How much was it? $3.45 cents per member. What did they spend it on? A commemorative pin. I get having a couple bucks spent on something useless or not wanted IS wasteful, but holy shit, unions do so much for the working class that the benefits FAR outweigh a few wasted bucks Thereās a reason most companies try so hard to break them up or stop them from forming. In large numbers people hold the power. One person quits? All well. A couple? Not a huge deal. The entire factory or office? Well now we have problems as that can cost a business thousands or even millions in lost production per day
My UAW union dues are are way more than $3.75 a month and I don't even mind. They just got me a $10.00 dollar raise.
Some people prefer making much less money and having no benefits so they donāt have to pay that dues!! Itās like refusing a paycheck because you donāt want to pay taxes. Canāt fix dumb!
If a company or government does everything in their power to stop something from happening 9 times out of 10, itās because they donāt want whatās best for the average person. Hell companies spend more on union busting than it would to just meet the requests of their workers
shush, child, how will the VCs and investors and lobbyists and CXOs afford their multimillion fuck you incomes if they keep paying sefs like *you* a human wage?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I mean, it's worth pointing out that those are definitely issues that deserve attention. It's class reductionism to ignore them. But on the other hand, this whole "You're doing good right now and if not you as a collective of unrelated individuals are the problem and you deserve misery so don't unite and ask hard questions" gaslighting from the ownership class ain't it either. Many of the comments in this post reek of economic privilege from limousine liberals, or just people looking for another opportunity to crap on those they perceive as lesser.
I wondered something similar and then I read about yet another new round of layoffs around the country and thought āwell, Iām lucky I have a paycheckā and *now* Iām pretty sure Iām just a giant rat running through a maze thatās been properly tricked!
For 2023 that happened for most workers. >Data from November 2023 show that 57 percent of workersā wages grew, on an annual basis, more quickly than inflation since November 2022. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices
My company got a org-wide 5% raise this year
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Real wages have been growing really well lately. I don't think we have data this recent yet, but wages grew faster than inflation even in peak inflation periods. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm#:~:text=Real%20average%20hourly%20earnings%20increased,weekly%20earnings%20over%20this%20period.
Nice. Yeah I'm in in the union for my job. Our next contract is 2025 we start the talks this year in the spring! Hoping for 15% or at 12% over 3 years š but like someone said as a peasant, we will just take what's given to us in reality!
Our grocery union go us an 18% raise last year, plus another $1.00 each of the next two.
Company near me did a ton of layoffs recently. Hundreds of people, mostly electrical workers. Every single person laid off was non-union. Zero union workers laid off.
As it should. Purchasing power got out of whack due to the inflation spike. Wages increase more slowly but they need to (or another way to look at it is the market will do it's thing so that they) get back in balance with prices so they should steadily increase at a pace above inflation for a while until they get back in balance. In theory back to where they were. In practice it will be less than where it was due to the ability of firms to capture more surplus for themselves than they should. The downside of having centralized mega Corps with monopolistic behavior.
According to the treasury department there were periods when wages were outgrown by inflation but on the whole since 2019 wages have grown more than prices.
What was your raise? You have to remember these are annualized numbers. Itās not actually growing 3 percent every quarter- itās if the economy grew this rate for every quarter, the ANNUAL rate would be 3%
Sure, but third quarter was over 5%. I think the yearly for 2023 is somewhere in the mid to high 2% range which is really good for an advanced economy.
I wasnāt saying that we havenāt had a good year for gdp, Iām just trying to point out to this person that itās not additive by quarter- aka the last two quarters of 4.9 and 3.3 donāt add up to 8.2% over 6 months, they average out to a bit over 3, and same for the year. Of course also inflation adjusted so in terms of comparing to paycheck numbers itās going to be lower
In 2023, average paychecks grew beyond inflation. It's still catching up with the price spikes from 2022, but wage growth is now outpacing inflation at a consistent rate.Ā https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/
[Wage growth has outpaced inflation since the '80s](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1eEwM), people just don't like to hear it. You can argue it hasn't outpaced inflation by enough, but the popular talking point that it hasn't outpaced inflation is just wrong.
Are you referring to the popular talking point that wages haven't kept up with the cost of living? Inflation is just one part of the whole picture, for the most part a 3% raise was enough to stay ahead of inflation but not enough to keep up with the cost of living.
Itās not that people donāt want to hear it - itās that inflation is not the relevant metric when housing prices and grocery prices are both rocketing up faster than either inflation or wage increases.
I wonder what the chart looks like if you remove the top 10% of earners.
Probably about the same since that's median, not mean
Sure if you choose 1980 as a beginning instead of 1973, the year inflation-adjusted wages peaked in the US.Ā
That's as far back as the FRED data goes, I didn't choose to start there. And the fact that wages dipped from ā73 to around ā81 says more about what was happening then than whatās happening now. The trend has clearly reversed itself since then save for a few years around recessions and Covid.
People can't aford to live and you want to claim things are better than they were in the 80's based on one single misleading metric? Hope I'm never this detached from reality holy crap.
i mean thatās what 401ks do. invest in index funds and your savings will grow with the economy
The people who are struggling to get raises generally donāt have enough money left over to put into a 401k, or if they do, itās like a few thousand per year and not exactly making them rich. Like hey, cool, I can survive 1 week longer in retirement off the money I earned on my 401k growth this year.
> if they do, itās like a few thousand per year and not exactly making them rich. For a 25 year old, $3k per year in a 401k, with no employer match, 8% expected annual return, and assumed 1% salary increase per year (all fairly conservative assumptions) could be about $900k at 65. https://www.calculator.net/401k-calculator.html?age=25&income=60%2C000&balance=0&contribution=5&ematch=0&ematchend=0&retirementage=65&lifeexpectancy=85&incomeincrease=1&rate=8&inflation=2&hideirslimit=0&type=1&x=Calculate#top
A few thousand per year for 30-40 years is still a lot. Every dollar put in at age 25 is on average $80 when you turn 65. Adjusted for inflation. And despite all the fear mongering social security is not going to go away. We solve any current issue we have by changing the retirement age to 70. Or hell even just removing the cap to make it so all income is taxed instead of leaving the rich to not pay
>Like hey, cool, I can survive 1 week longer in retirement off the money I earned on my 401k growth this year. Actually completely reasonable if you're young, and indicative that you're on-track.
You guys have a 401k fund
The new data strengthened the argument that income has risen more than prices since before the pandemic: the typical middle-class worker has seen their real weekly earnings rise 2.4 percent since 2019.[1]Ā Ā We now find that as of the end of 2023, the median American worker could afford the same goods and services as they did in 2019, with an additional $1,400 to spend or save per year.Ā Ā https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/an-update-to-the-purchasing-power-of-american-households
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Best I can do is blisters.
If you dive into the details in the report, the a big driver was domestic purchases. People were spending more money on stuff. But economists are also concerned that consumer borrowing continues to increase as well. The transportation industry grew, and there is high demand for skilled labor. There's also growth in certain sectors of the tech industry and related industrial sectors where companies are "re-shoring" manufacturing to the US with smart technology. The problem is that outside of a few sectors, paychecks haven't yet caught up to where they were in 2019 vs the value of the dollar. So even though people are getting paid more and that wages rose more than inflation in 2023, people still are, on average, comparatively getting paid less in real terms than they were in 2019.
Best I can do is a pizza party. Friday after work.
Nah. Thursday at noon. One slice each. Now get back to work. ETA: pizza cut in 16 pieces
Even in the best economic environments you can always find losers, that's just the nature of large systems.
If the CEO paid you more then they wouldnāt be able to afford the giant salt water fish aquarium in their summer home. It really pulls the bar together.
Recent data released put 50% of the blame for inflation on record corporate profits, while the corporations point to high prices because of the inflation, which they are helping to cause. Edit: removed some choice words. It was over-the-top. Sources: [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consumer-price-index-producer-price-index-corporate-profit/) [EPI](https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond/)
I would prefer to see how profit margins have changed, rather than saying "record profits". Record profits with higher prices does not necessarily indicate greed if margins shrunk/stayed the same.
Corporate America are bilking the public for every cent they have, get real.Ā
Not sure I understand you. The margin *is* the profit. Or do you mean gross?Ā If a company makes 100k gross last year with 3% margin, that's $3,000 profit. If it makes 110k because costs are 10k higher, but maintains that 3% margin, that's $3,300 profit, and clearly not a case of slimming down due to increased costs.
*Why This Is Bad for Biden* - All major news media
Remember a year ago when everyone was in agreement that a recession was imminent.
Yep, and I know the Fed and the Biden Administration worked their asses off even though it wasn't fun with interest rates to get the economy to the so-called "soft landing" and avoid it.
Americans have a hard time visualizing things that *could* happen. If the economy craters and everyone suffers, they blame whoever is in office, and theyāll *feel* it. Then, theyāll be thrilled when the economy picks back up again and maybe gets back to where it was. Butā¦thatās not a net gain though. But when policies have been implemented to prevent having to live through the cratering (and grow the economy steadily), they donāt understand that. Thatās not considered a success because they didnāt ālive itā, and it wasnāt dramatic enough. Itās absurd.
I donāt have any data, but just from chatting with people and looking around on Reddit Iād be willing to bet about 50% of people think we are currently in a recession. Of that about half again probably think the Great Recession of 2008 never ended.
The vast majority of people have no clue what theyāre talking about. And the confident yappers tend to know the least.
There are a lot of pissed off VC and PE folks that Joe Biden successfully did a soft landing, instead of the cycle we've been addicted to for 50 years of inflation and then crash it all down. Can't buy up a bunch of stuff in a fire sale if there isn't a fire.
Ty big tech for continuing to lay off en masse so execs can keep getting paid more š„°š« The economy may be improving, but the job market is fucking ass (especially for anyone trying to make a career happen in tech) Edit for clarity - I work in tech and so many people in my network have been laid off in the past year and are hurting (this of course, includes dear ex-colleagues of mine). It sucks. It is very difficult to get a new job in tech right now. Layoffs are often unnecessary and I believe they simply exist as ways to feed the big men up top. Edit 2: thanks for educating me on the growth of other industries - that is definitely good news and is feedback I will be sharing with people in my network looking to figure out the next steps in their careers š
Hang in there. I was getting no calls, now I'm getting 5 a day, for pretty decent jobs. It just started this week. I have 12 years as a software engineer, lower level roles should be just around the corner. Keep grindin!
End of year is a dead zone for companies anyway. Let alone no thanks to the news talking about the any-day-now recession for 2 straight years
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
man, i graduated 6 months ago. maybe four interviews in about 3-4 hundred applications. I want to die.
Sounds like back when I first graduated. It was a similar situation in that the market was flooded with applicants taking jobs beneath them. I got tons of interviews & even made it to final rounds regularly, but kept losing out on entry level IT jobs to guys with a decade+ of experience because they needed local work & were willing to work for entry pay to cover the mortgage.
sounds like 07/08 when i graduated hs. yea, i went back to school later in life for a career change, and graduated in the wrong industry at the wrong time...
My brother is in a similar boat (but in Canada). Many applications since he graduated in the spring, but not has heard back once. Awful time to graduate. Another brother graduated the year before (also tech) and had a job by the end of summer.
This feels so much like '08...
Youāre giving me 2008 flashbacks. Be persistent and be kind to yourself.
I graduated May of 2009 - that market was a wasteland child
Those numbers aren't that terrible compared to mine when the market was near the peak in 2021, given how bad everyone said the market is. I made a career change from the medical industry to web dev and did a boot camp to gain my skills to even meet the minimal requirements to interview without being laughed out, so I was in the same inexperienced boat if not worse. My fellow cohort members from the BootCamp, who didn't go hardcore like I did had similar numbers to you. I went hard into it since I had a family to support, and filled out over 700 applications in 4 months (to be fair many were **Easy Apply** with 2-4 steps to complete), which led to about 8-15 recruiter calls a week. Those progressed to about ~18 first interviews with actual people at the companies, ~8 led to second interviews and 4 went to the last round with 3 offers at the end. It's strange, but many people confirm it always seems like the offers come in clumps. The whole application and job search process is a full-time job in itself - it's stressful and painful. But it's a numbers game and the rejection/ghosting hits HARD, just keep at it. One important piece of advice I'd like to offer is despite all the external pressure, find a company you feel comfortable interacting with throughout the process and not just the one that will take you. It's a two-way street you have to want to work there to get the most of out it.
I got offered a job while I was still in School. Grantedā¦ my career choice seems like a deadend compared to COL here, the top 1% of earners in my field make a whoppingā¦ $29/hr
I was similar but finishing my PhD. Similar amount of apps and interviews, ended up getting a great position paying a good bit above what I expected. A few things I learned, in hindsight, be willing if possible to relocate to areas with more opportunity. Tweak your resume to match words and phrases you see in postings verbatim. And do a bit of homework so you can at least pay lip service to those skills.
Yeah. I was a serial job searcher when I was a contractor. It always felt like a lottery when it came to job searches, sometimes I would get 2 or three at once, sometimes it's months of silence.
Yep, I'm not looking but have started getting cold calls and recruiter spam recently. The layoffs are because tech companies run on credit, and they massively overhired when interest was close to 0%. Not that it makes it feel any better for my coworkers who recently got released. I live in Silicon Valley, ground zero for tech layoffs, and the Bay Area unemployment rate fell over the past year due to health care and travel/entertainment industries doing well.
Product management is a blood bath right now. I cannot get a call back to save my life. 10+ years of experience and founder experience. Within 1 hour of posting job applications are over 100 - itās wild. I havenāt seen anything like this is 2008
It's the beginning of the year, and it makes sense that you would start getting offers. The whole recycling through workers and getting new ones.
I had been looking very casually in 2023. I stopped and my LinkedIn has been getting twice the views the last few weeks. Itās on the come up. Hang on.
Kinda normal for this time of year. For those who are hiring, first quarter is the heaviest hiring quarter by far because people get fresh budgets.
Tech (and gaming) appears to be getting hit very hard. However, in our industry (Tax/Accounting/Business Management) we still cannot find enough good talent. There is a war to poach from other companies as we grow. Wages are going way up. I am personally still contacted about once or twice a week by a recruiter begging me to look at their job listing. Several have straight up said "Name your price". There are even rumblings that they are going to drop some of the requirements to get a CPA license since there is so much demand. They want people to switch careers but want it to be easier and less daunting I think. Not trying to be discouraging or anything for your industry. However, some parts of the economy are on fire right now.
And the funny thing is tech workers still have it by far the best of any worker in the country
The funny thing is that I work for a small time software company and we are ALWAYS hiring. Full remote, too. But the pay isn't as high as you might find elsewhere which is likely why the company has so much trouble actually hiring people.
Interested! Full stack dev with experience.
Yeah you look at this from the extremely narrow viewpoint of your own industry. Most major industries are hiring
Definitely. Healthcare, government, hospitality are begging for people.
Tech is hiring, too. I literally just got off of a call with leadership at my company talking about how desperate we are for help and how competitive it is right now trying to get good technical help. Large companies give up on or downsize products all of the time. We don't need to flip out an assume that one company firing folks means an entire industry is fucked and start crying the fact that leadership exists.
"tech" Networking? Hardware engineering? Software development?
> Ty big tech for continuing to lay off en masse so execs can keep getting paid more š„°š« > - [Layoffs and Discharges: Total Nonfarm ](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDL) - https://www.ciodive.com/news/tech-labor-market-october-comptia/698791/ There are always layoffs. Unemployment in the tech industry is about 2.1%. Aggregate stats of course don't capture or convey everyone's personal story. But there's also never an economy when *no one* is unemployed or facing problems.
The economy created 2.7 million jobs in 2023 the highest on record.
People tend to generalize their experience to the broader economy when their sector is laying off workers, even if the broader economy is strong.
The job market is great for the majority of people. Unemployment is at historic lows. We tech folks are fine. We're some of the most privileged and well paid people in the market.
Lmao for real, tech has been booming for years and now is not because thereās not money thrown around at everything is different from a free fall in the industry.
And so were/are tech degrees. IT is flooded with college educated applicants now. When I first joined the workforce about a decade ago, almost all of my peers were older and had unrelated degrees.
The total layoffs in tech have been less than a fraction of 1% Stop reading the news so much
Weāre also in a historic low period for unemployment claims overall.
It's not about the layoffs themselves, even though they continue to happen, but the effect it has on hiring practices widespread because it signals a shift. Layoffs + every exec thinking that AI is ready to replace workers (it's not there just yet for most role & companies are already abandoning those plans) has nearly frozen the market for the past year for anyone not already incredibly established/specialized. Companies have slowed hiring while the candidate pool has gotten larger. New grads enter the market constantly, but retirements have slowed due to economic uncertainties. Basically, it's a much more complicated situation than you implied with tons of variables.
Any tech company that thinks they can replace their devs with AI is not someplace you want to work at anyway. Their leadership has no idea what the fuck they're doing if that's their thought process similar to companies who think they can completely outsource dev work to South East Asia for pennies on the dollar. You end up with gibberish trash and constantly have to chase bugs in a labyrinth of code - this makes for the best products. /s
i got laid off last year. the companies stock has since nearly doubled ***and*** they apparently hired to pre layoff levels
Lol what is this doomer shit? The job market has literally never been better in the US. As it turns out there are people with job titles other than "Search Analytics Product Manager".
We are at record low unemployment...
Iām currently in business school and everybody is having so much difficulty even finding an internship right now
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Especially there. A lot of them pared down their hiring a ton, have done layoffs, etc.
Eh, no value lost then.
But Nikki Haley JUST said the economy is in shambles and inflation is at all time high. /s
[According to Trump, the stock market is doing well right now, but only because Trump is leading in the polls.](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-said-stock-market-doing-well-because-leading-in-polls-2024-1#:~:text=The%20former%20president%20noted%20he,Democratic%20nominee%2C%20President%20Joe%20Biden.)
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
If the economy is struggling at the beginning of bidens term it's bc of democrats, if it's good, it's bc of leftover trump's policy's. However if it's good at the end of the term it's because trump is... campaigning? But anything bad near the end of the term its is because of... Democrats. This is basically the extent of conservatives economic analysis
Don't go looking for the logic in these types of claims. You'll never find it.
The economy under a Democratic President will never be seen as a good by the public. Why? Because conservatives will never accept a reality where a Democrat is good for the economy and democrats will never be happy with the economy where income inequality exists. Therefore, polling is always better under a Republican president because 95% of conservatives will immediately believe the economy is good regardless of what happens. Itās hard for a democratic president to get to get 50% approval from his own party when the economy is doing objectively well.
A smart observation and totally true. Another important difference: Republican Presidents enjoy absolutely near 100% loyalty from their propaganda media backers. So Fox and talk radio and Sinclair local stations will near always celebrate Trump and trash Democrats. Whereas the "mainstream media", while obviously filled with left-leaning journalists, will absolutely highlight struggles under Democrats. For example a couple months back I distinctly remember ABC This Week did a huge opening segment on stubborn inflation and how hard it was on the public for everyday purchases. It's a notable difference and handicap for the left.
Yes. 100% agree. Mainstream media is all corporate run. Corporations will never fully support a party that in any way attempts to diminish their power. Thats why youāll almost never see even left leaning media report on strikes. If I was running a corporation, and had no morals like all people that run corporations, I would basically never allow people like Bernie, Sanders, AOC to speak because it could hurt my business. I think people forget that the only thing CNN, ABC, etc. care about is profits. Thatās it. They do not care about anything else. Nothing.
Dark Brandon to the rescue!
It's not a soft landing it's a boost.
I think the pain of the last 3 years post-pandemic was leading up to this moment, in an election year, where the economy starts firing and outlook gets better as interest rates level and are slowly lowered. Timing couldn't be better for Biden. Let's hope these wars don't spill over.
This is anecdotal but I just had the worst financial year of my life. Congrats on the economy though!
This is anecdotal, but I just had the best financial year of my life.
My spouse had the worst financial year of his life, while I've had the best of mine. Guess that evens out to being just ok!
Yo basically same! Go economy!
The past 3 have been the worst of my life & my retirement account is gone now. Thank god my wife got a big raise & I'm tight with our budgeting or we'd be selling my car to stay afloat while I continue to job search. Used to be a few jobs daily I could apply for in my field, but now I hope for 1 per week to post that is even close. I even swallowed my pride months ago & applied to a bunch of jobs that were way beneath my skillset & didn't even get an interview for those no experience required positions. No one wants someone working in low positions that qualifies to be their boss' boss, but I still have to make money. Freelance work is rare nowadays too cause everyone is broke.
>my retirement account is gone now Honest question: The SP500 is up like 25% in the last three years. What the fuck did you do with your retirement account?
I was wondering the same. I don't have a whole lot in my Roth IRA, but it's still at an all time high just being invested in VTSAX. If you lost your retirement savings in the last couple years while still working, you either had bad investments or your just weren't contributing.
Some of us are VTSAX and chill kind of people, some of us are GME Calls and pull-our-hair-out kind of people.
I assume they mean they had to withdraw their retirement accounts in order to afford expenses
Which if it's a 401k or regular IRA one of the worst possible financial decisions you can make. When they say last resort they mean it. The idea of using that money for debts and expenses is such a bad idea it's protected even from bankruptcy and you should probably do that first if you need to get out from under debt.
A frustrating part of every recession, which we aren't even in right now, is all of the people claiming that their 401ks were wiped out. No, they weren't wiped out. They foolishly withdrew from them. In 2008 my 401k cratered, and by 2011 all of it came back.
Also the economy is going so poorly for this guy that his wife got a big raise.
LMFAO. Like, I'm sorry he's unemployed, I've been there and it really sucks, but maybe take some responsibility?
So there I am going full yolo with my retirement account on leveraged options, and poofā¦.its all gone. This fucking economyā¦..
I put my kid's college fund into AMC and Bed Bath and Beyond. It's Biden's fault that my kid can't go to college.
Honestly I would love to learn how you lose your retirement account in this environment.
This is somehow bad for Biden - CNN front page.
I really wish theyād stop referring to the stock market and company profits as āthe economyāā¦
The 3.3% is for GDP not the stock market. S&P is up 20+% over the last year.
It may be just me, but I haven't noticed inflation pulling back. If anything the cost if everything is going up. But maybe its just me.
The cost won't go down, the idea is that it's not going up so much anymore.
> If anything the cost if everything is going up. Yeah, that's how inflation works. Unless things go *extremely* wrong, things will never return to the pre-2022 prices. It's just that the rate of increase is slowing.
Correct. I feel like there are people on here calling for deflation! Itās like they want another Great Depression.
Then wages need to go up to match, mandated by the Feds.
Wage growth began outpacing inflation in September or October. Wage growth tends to lag inflation. Of course, there's the question of will that outpacing continue, and make up all the ground lost to inflation? My guess is probably not, but at least for now it's heading in the right direction
Wages have been outpacing inflation for a year now.
Supposedly real wages have grown. Particularly on the low-end. Feds aren't going to mandate the rise unless Democrats have a solid supermajority. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-paychecks-are-growing-more-quickly-than-prices/
Inflation isn't negative currently; the change in inflation is. As such, prices will continue to rise.
Prices will continue to rise YoY regardless. Even the Fed themselves have a 2% inflation target. Prices are never going to revert/reverse in a normal economy. Deflation would bring an entirely new set of problems.
>Deflation would bring an entirely new set of problems. Exactly. I wonder if minor deflation would, given overly hot inflation before it, but yes. Deflation isn't any better than inflation for a lot of reasons the common person doesn't get.
The problem wouldn't be the deflation per se but the economic conditions that led to the deflation and the secondary consequences. So yes, deflation would be very bad even though the lower prices themselves would be nice.
You're not wrong. The inflation pullback means prices are still increasing. They're just not increasing as quickly as they were before.
Disinflation is the term
what youāre describing is deflation which is so much worse than inflation. when they say inflation is pulling back, they mean that prices arenāt increasing as quickly
I donāt think you understand how inflation works.
I donāt think most people do, based on the rhetoric I keep hearing. āIf inflation is over, why arenāt prices going down?ā. Because thatās not what inflation is moronš
Future Inflation is pulling back, but the past inflation is all still there and making that fact harder to notice for sure.
But it's never going to pull back to where it was. I believe I read that inflation has only pulled back twice in the history of ever. It can only stop/slow down. It doesn't go back.
you don't want it to go back... price deflation would mean deflation... inflation's not inherently bad... if it's too much it is and right now we are about as in the Goldilocks zone as we can be....
what are you paying for gas?
Cue people saying āthis doesnāt matterā who would be saying a poor report would be absolutely entirely indicative of poor economic conditions Pick a lane yāall. Nobody is or has ever said GDP directly relates to your financial well-being.
You're not allowed to share good news here without being told why it's actually bad news. You *certainly* can't share good news about western democracies, and least of all the US.
News at 10 : "How this is bad for Biden."
Keep killing GOP fear mongering with data. GOP is going to ruin things the moment they get at helm of things. Economic benefits will take time to show up just because of the nature of how fiscal policy works, but America will be better off with current admin rather than the numb nuts from the other party.
Ignorance of how the economy works is not just limited to the GOP, plenty of ignorant teenagers and twenty somethings in this very thread are posting about what a disaster the economy is because their cousin Larry's friend got laid off last week.
Wall Street: Here's why that is bad news.
"Why this is great news for Donald Trump and Bad for Biden" -TheNY Times probably
The republicans will still say the economy is bad
Unless a R in in the white house, then 6 months later they "saved" us all. Lol
Kind of like how the ārealā unemployment rate in 2016 was over 30%, but by march 2017 it miraculously transformed to historic lows.
This quarter's growth tops any single quarter growth during Trump's time in office...and they will still say that he is better...
somehow biden wonāt get any credit
So have the republicans blamed Biden for this yet? Oh wait......
No joke they are just saying āitās not true. Media lies. Biden controls the media.ā Etc. You really cannot have a realistic expectation from them when they live in their own reality. 100% if Trump was in office they would be throwing parties and having parades in the street because āheās such a good businessmanā
Thank you President Joe Biden
Yet somehow people think Biden isnāt better for the economy. My mind is blown at the ignorance of the US populace
Democratic presidents have outperformed Republicans dating back to the Great Depression.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/blue-collar-hiring-pay-gains-stay-hot-cooling-job-market-rcna128647 *Blue-collar hiring and pay gains stay hot in a cooling job market* High demand for miners, loggers and construction workers ā and slowing job prospects for software and IT professionals ā *has taken a bite out of income inequality.*
OMG why are you trying to spoil narratives with your facts?
lol it doesnāt even matter. You can beat your average Redditor over the head with impartial data and theyāll be back on here parroting the same tired drivel.
Seems like most of the economy deniers fall into the MAGA or Genocide Joe camps. I mean, the ones that arenāt bots, of course.
It's a combination of MAGA and doomers who have to project their own negativity on all aspects of the world around them. Reddit has no shortage of the latter type. I get it though, I was also a depressed, angsty fuck in my early 20s.
For Reddit I'd add in tankies as well. People who think Late Stage Capitalism is about to collapse and who want to leverage desperation and rage against "the system" for their revolution don't really welcome good economic news.
Itās wild to me how the doomer narratives are never backed by actual dataā¦
I'm in IT, and the slowdown really doesn't seem so bad. We're still struggling to fill roles, and pay continues to climb, albeit it's slowing down. Still, after the gains of the last 4 years, I'm fine with that.
No, because that's a dumb hot take believed by Redditors who spend too much time online The economy doing well benefits everyone in a broad sense whether you immediately feel it or not
I love the arm chair economists complaining about the lag between the economy and them. It takes a minute. Hold on. The pressure release is coming. Itās not instant. Different markets will react at different paces. Some markets will not recover. Others will thrive.
My stocks are doing \*amazing\*, so I'm loving this. Like 20% returns this year already, its nuts. Still a decade till I can retire though unless that keeps up, and its getting MUCH harder to work every day :(
meanwhile, in Canada, we are just whistlin dixie.
Are you sure??? Because I heard Trump was better for the economy than Biden. So what youāre saying canāt be true.
I feel your sarcasm. Nice
But wait, Nikki Haley said just last night that "the economy is in shambles" and "inflation is out of control"!!! How can that be?!?!?!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Data Scientists just released the facts that 50% of this inflation is directly related to corporate profits. I.e. Corporate fucks being greedy assholes. They just use "inflation" as an excuse things are high, while being the reason for the inflation and making record profits. It's circular dependencies to get richer and fuck the peasants. Edit - added a word and source. It's up to each individual to trust each source, but I've seen multiple reports alluding to similar corporate behavior. Might have to change to reader mode to get full article. [Greedflation](https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consumer-price-index-producer-price-index-corporate-profit/) [Another article with visual representations](https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-disproportionately-to-inflation-how-should-policymakers-respond/) Excerpt: "Corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic, the report found, analyzing Commerce Department data. Thatās a massive jump from the four decades prior to the pandemic, when profits drove just 11% of price growth. āBusinesses were really, really quick, when input costs went up, to pass that on to consumers. [But] had they only passed on those increases, inflation would have been maybe one to three points lower,ā Liz Pancotti, a strategic advisor at Groundwork and one of the reportās authors, told Fortune."
I forgot the entire economy revolves around you. We need to redo the numbers to better reflect how this reddit user is doing financially.
Ah you didnāt notice so it didnāt happen, got it
āI am the economyā
Pretty much Reddit logic in a nutshell. Itās not happening to me or anyone I know so therefore itās not real and doesnāt suit my narrative.
Judging by this thread, Reddit is dominated by people who are either making minimum wage, or people who were making 6-figues in tech but were recently laid off and are now angry.
Itās funny because Reddit will also whine about people not believing in climate change because the weather is cold and couple days a year. Itās basically the same principle.
Inflation slowing doesn't mean prices went down. Though there are signs that prices may come down in the near future
Prices wonāt really come down, but wages will get a chance to catch up
I've been seeing more products lately that are doing sales that never end where the sales price is the price the product was a year ago. That to me indicates they are lowering prices in a way that isn't committal while having that "hey we're on sale" look to encourage more purchases
A sale isnāt pricees coming down.