350
Americans need an extra $11,400 today just to afford the basics
(www.cbsnews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
350 points (92.9% liked)
News
23305 readers
3533 users here now
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.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I gave the methodology a read, and it's a real head scratcher. I haven't sat down and done the math myself, but if I were going to, I would first investigate all the assumptions they had to make, such as:
Anyway, this is where I would start picking this mess apart. If I were so inclined.
From this little bit, I'd be concerned about the analysis using suppressed spending in 2020 as the starting point in 2021, as well as including spending from outside the CPI basket and non household entities in CPI estimates. I'd be concerned about over generalizing the states by estimating using their census units. Basically, I'd consider this report skeptically at best if no additional validation can be provided.
It's not really that far off the mark when you just look at your own budget at home, though. Shit on average costs about 10-20% more (and for some products, even higher than that) than it did 5 years ago. Hell, 85/15 ground beef was ~$5/lb back in 2019/2020 where I live, now it's $7.50/lb, that's 50% increase right there. Same with milk and eggs.
Bottom line: I think you way over analyzed something that can easily be solved by just looking at your grocery and monthly bills now vs a few years ago.
Their estimate of $11k is too high for me. But I can easily see this being the case in some areas. For me, our cost of living has definitely increased by about $500/month, so $6000/yr. But, I also live somewhere with a relatively low cost of living.
People will use bad analysis to play on your gut feelings because they want you to act a certain way. In this case, republican senators created a flawed analysis specifically to make people who feel like you do wrongly associate rising costs with democratic policy and policy makers. Whose best interest is it in to uncritically accept their analysis? Who gains from their overestimate?
Huh? Where did I say anything about politics?
I was simply saying it's far easier to figure out how much inflation has effected you by looking at your monthly bills' trend over the last few years. You have to be on another planet if you don't think inflation has been awful. Some of that has been due to Democrats' policies, some of it Republicans', and the rest of it simple corporate greed. But none of that commentary was on my original comment.
Edit: I should add that the economy is far too complex and massive for one person to immediately impact it to that degree (barring some insane, drastic action). People who think the president has a magic economy and gas price button are idiots. Congress ultimately controls a large amount of economic impact (e.g. enacting the Build Back Better bill that Biden was the PR spokesperson for).