The short answer is Americans are fucked. The slightly longer: While there may be a slight improvement in savings from 2020 to 2023, there was a point where people were trending upwards in savings before it took a dive down and stagnated, which people both will notice and rightly be upset with. This fact is more significant to the population.

That is, being "I got up to 3k in my savings two years ago and thought I was finally getting ahead and now it's down to 2.2k because of life." Is more meaningful to a person than "Well three years ago you had 2k and now you have 2.2k after those three years of trying to save, you're doing better, guys, better appreciate Biden's economy"

Or: losing 800 dollars over 2 years means more to a person's psyche than gaining 200 over 3 years.

I had to look back at the graph after the explanations so here's the shortest version

• "politicians say it's good you've gone from the left line to the right line - an increase in nearly $1000 on average"

• "they ignore line 2 in the middle which shows that people went up more than twice as much before coming down again to nearly where they were before"

• so while it's true to say there's been an increase, it's equally true to say there has been a massive decrease too.

• people who actually have to live like this won't find it helpful to make a comparison to when they had slightly less money when there was a more recent time that they had a lot more money

It's personal banking balances. The focus is on three points: January 2020, January 2021, and January 2023. ~~#2 is Biden's inauguration.~~ Edit... The very annoying lib pointed that out to me that #2 is the enactment of the "American Rescue Act of 2021" in March, 2021.

Any economist can look at the vertical line of #1 and #3 but entirely skip #2 and say "There's been an increase from 2020 to 2023." A huge problem in economics is that many of economists never speak to typical people and they especially avoid poor people. Their heads are only filled with numbers and data.

They often act like typical people are morons who don't know anything and don't understand anything. They are smug when polling shows many Americans feel worse off. But people are concerned about the fall from #2 to #3.

Of course - economics colors the media and politics. Pundit brain and DC brain etc are similar to economist brain. Biden and his team come out with PR that "Bidenomics is working!" without understanding how typical Americans will view their rose-colored perspective. Democrats are flummoxed why people don't get it.

This is all very predictable yet it happens all the time

Yeah I had to look at this at least 4 or 5 times before I understood it lol

/r/dataisugly