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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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politics
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Because most Americans can’t afford to loose a week of pay?
Because it’s a zero-sum game and most Americans are losing so rich fucks can have their “good economy”.
Biden is so fucking out of touch it’s embarrassing.
That does seem to be what his rhetoric is pointing at:
"bring prices down"? Does Biden think we're in a deflationary period or is he intentionally misleading people?
EDIT: It's weird how when people ask why prices haven't come down they're mocked for not understanding the difference between deflation and lower inflation. But when the president of the United States confuses them and I point it out I get down voted. Classy people. Classy.
It’s not allowed to discuss “bring wages up.” Only impossibilities of putting the genie back in the bottle such as this. That way Biden can continue to deliver on his most important promise to donors - nothing will fundamentally change.
The latter or both.
Polling suggests this is not the case. In December there was a poll of swing states that showed the people were split 50/50 on whether what they saw in their own lives, their local or city economy, was heading in the right direction but when asked about the national economy, something they have to rely upon the media for rather than their own experience, only 1 in 4 thought things were heading in the right direction. People are constantly fed negative economic propaganda but don't see it in their own communities so they assume it's happening everywhere else.
Polling is opinion, and they all have varied (and usually terrible) reasons for their opinions. But some telling statistics?
nearly half of Americans have little to no savings , while 89% of Americans save, the average savings is ~1000, and 60% don’t have a retirement account
60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
About 50% of people under 65 have trouble affording healthcare- with insurance
All while corporations are netting record profits despite all this.
I get my credit score up through tricks of the trade, get whatever procedure I need on credit, and then don't pay at all, because I can't afford basic medical even though I work, for above minimum wage no less. They want too much for essential medical treatments, so now I have to do this to survive, I just hope that between every 2 years when my credit tricks work again, that I don't get mysteriously ill with no way to pay. I tried everything. I work 40 hours and live in a very basic tract home built in the 90s with roommates, I sell things on the side, my old man does repairs/handyman services, we don't shop, or go on dates, or get to enjoy life really at all outside the home, hell, I've even tried selling porn; but apparently I'm not hot enough to pull that off either. And to top off this absolutely lack of sundae; I work enough to not qualify for any assistance despite all the above details keeping me stuck renting/working a shit job until something breaks or I get sick or somebody dies. I know some of y'all are gonna hate me for this, but I didn't create this broken economy where $10-$30 a month for insurance is an unaffordable expense on top of copays and deductibles and all the BS to make sure you never use the service they've made you purchase... When is enough gonna be enough? Then our leaders have the balls to ask why we're upset? Give me a damn break.
You should be one of Biden's economic advisors.
Oh no, more negative propaganda! Better hide it before it shows up in the polls! 🙄
Does anyone under the age of 50 respond to polling calls/emails? Polls are shit for actual representation nowadays and are mainly used as a way to influence rather than gauge.
Yeah, but have you met anyone from Wisconsin?
Went to a wedding in Milwaukee last summer, it wasn't terrible. I wouldn't want to be there in the winter, I'm content to stay in California. I was on the college side, but it seemed like a slightly larger Redding/Chico area. A lot more brick, closer to a major city, and with more local national level sports teams. The locals seemed nice enough, I enjoyed the first generation immigrants running their cafes.
On the contrary, the fastest growth in real income right now is among those in the lowest quintile. Which means income inequality is actually decreasing for the first time in decades.
Maybe in a few decades people will feel better about it.
Well said! Very well said.
“Fastest growing in real income” sounds really fancy.
But it’s a bit misleading. I assume you’re looking at percentage gains. For someone working 40 hrs/week 42 weeks a year, a dollar raise (which is huge for that “lowest quintile”), would equate to a bit more than 2,000 per year.
At federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, that dollar gain represents an increase of 13%. At 15 an hour, its a 6% gain. At 200k/year? Barely a percent. For Walmart CEO, for example, who’s salary is 24.1 million is barely even worth mentioning at .08%.
Said another way, Walmart has 2.2 million “associates” which iirc, is everyone whose not a manager. Let’s say 3 million people who aren’t corporate because I don’t care to go get the accurate stats and frankly want to keep the math easy.
So if they gave them all a 1 dollar raise, that would cost Walmart 3 million dollars. Last year, Walmarts annual gross profit was 147.568 billion, with a 2.65% increase over ‘22. An increase of 3.8 billion dollars.
You know the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion. That hypothetical dollar increase would have been a rounding error on their financial statements.
I think your numbers are off. It would cost $3m to give 3m workers a bump of exactly one dollar on exactly one paycheck. That's not a 13% increase. It's not even a 0.01% increase.
If you actually wanted to increase the wage of 3m full time workers from $7.25 to $8.25, it would cost $6 billion.
This isn't really relevant. Gross profit is Walmart sales minus what it paid manufacturers for its products. So if it buys a TV for $200 and sells it for $300, that's $100 in gross profit.
Gross profit is used to pay employees, rent, utilities, advertisers, etc. The amount left over after paying the bills is the operating income. Then they pay taxes on that, and the actual earnings (aka net income) are left over.
Nearly all of Walmart's gross profit was used to pay employees, etc. Their operating income was $23 billion in 2023, which is a decrease of 20% from the previous year. Of note, this coincides with pay increases for Walmart's hourly workers, from $17.50 to $18/hr on average.
That's a mountain sized "etc" covering mainly shareholder dividends and artificial profit minimizing for tax avoidance purposes.
The publicly reported profit margins are always AFTER those things and as such as informative about reality as having literally no information.
No, operating income does not take dividend payments into account.
The fact is that employee payroll/salaries is one of Walmart's biggest expenses by far, and gross profit does not include it. So you cannot use gross profit to argue that Walmart could afford to give its workers a raise.
It's the equivalent of looking only at someone's salary and then saying they should put more away for retirement. You are ignoring their expenses.
That just shows that the economy is not "booming" as they say in the capitalist media - the needle may be moving in the right direction, but we need to acknowledge that the current position of that needle is deep in the gutter, with a lot of improvement still needed before the voting public feels like the economy is actually working for them. Claiming that the economy is doing well, when the people are not doing well economically except for a handful of ultrawealthy, causes feelings of resentment and alienation in people who are currently working hard and still unable to afford basic necessities, ie the majority of Americans. It makes the journalists and the politicians they appear to be hyping seem out of touch and unaware of the problems the voters are dealing with, and therefore it does not inspire hope that those problems are being worked on.
Showing that the needle is moving in the right direction is an important component of effective messaging, but so is demonstrating a clear eyed view of the problem. Articles that talk about how 'strong' the economy is fail on the latter.