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Thank you for this video . I absolutely love a comment section that isn't overrun with hateful trolls too. I'm definitely subscribing to your channel 👍
I think you made mistake in overlooking psychological aspect of your video. People struggling financially will hear from you that it is not so bad and negative outlook is caused by: media bias, political view and they are not seeing that economy improved already in past couple quarters. What they will feel? Can you convince someone who defaulted that it is all good? Not really, they will be angry and they will be more likely to write comment about it than people happy with economy situation. Could you avoid this? Maybe... but you would need to make it far longer than 17 min video and touch topics of defaults, new hires, layoffs, changing one full time job to couple part time, gig jobs, workforce share in income, using median values everywhere and talk about distribution of that data. Then you would need to address popular arguments for weak economy: real GDI Vs real GDP, workforce participation, drop in full time jobs, inconsistent and less trustworthy government data (a lot of revisions in one direction and moving people from workforce in spikes, regional PMIs inconsistent with national level) etc It would be complicated, long video. Maybe it is worthwhile or maybe this whole topic is landmine.
I think you made mistake in overlooking psychological aspect of your video. People struggling financially will hear from you that it is not so bad and negative outlook is caused by: media bias, political view and not seeing that economy improved already. What such will feel? Can you convince someone who defaulted that it is all good? Not really, they will be angry and they will be more likely to write comment about it than people happy with economy situation. Could you avoid this? I'm not sure. Maybe... but you would need to make it far longer than 17 min video and touch topics of defaults, new hires, layoffs, changing one full time job to couple part time, gig jobs, workforce share in income. Then you would need to address popular arguments for weak economy: real GDI Vs real GDP, workforce participation, drop in full time jobs, inconsistent and less trustworthy offical data (a lot of revisions in one direction and moving people from workforce in spikes, regional PMIs inconsistent with national level) etc It would be complicated, long video. Maybe it is worthwhile or maybe this whole topic is landmine.
I think you made mistake in overlooking psychological aspect of your video. People struggling financially will hear from you that it is not so bad and negative outlook is caused by: news bias, political view and not seeing that economy improved already. What such will feel? Can you convince someone who defaulted that it is all good? Not really, they will be angry and they will be more likely to write comment about it than people happy with economy situation. Could you avoid this? I'm not sure. Maybe... but you would need to make it far longer than 17 min video and touch topics of defaults, new hires, layoffs, changing one full time job to couple part time, gig jobs, workforce share in income. Then you would need to address popular arguments for weak economy: real GDI Vs real GDP, workforce participation, drop in full time jobs, inconsistent and less trustworthy data (a lot of revisions in one direction and moving people from workforce in spikes, regional PMIs inconsistent with national level) etc It would be complicated, long video. Maybe it is worthwhile or maybe this whole topic is landmine.
From what I observed, if you look at the employment data, you will see that in Biden's economy, the majority of the gains are for blue collar workers in manufacturing and healthcare. In contrast, the majority of the losses are white collar workers in tech and finance, both suffers from high interest rate and layoffs. Not to mention this also affect recent college graduates who struggle to find jobs. This group is relatively more represented in our media, both social and mainstream.
Services industry (restaurant and hotels especially) also so wages spike. There was a massive number of layoffs, followed by a rush to hire people back. I saw gas stations and pizza parlors with signing bonuses locally. For one glorious quarter, the wages for Services Industries like Hospitality rose faster than those of Bankers :)
Why isn't this being reflected in voting patterns and polls for Democrats? Also white collar workers vote and pay taxes too, it's madness to dismiss their experience as a distortion of reality.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia But it did: Democrats won a lot of key local elections recently last November (or at least was not completely wiped in solid red states and districts). Not to mention Democrats are reporting much better fundraising. As for polling, the video gave a theory for it already. Also I never said that I dismiss white collar workers and if you think so, your english reading comprehension is the issue. If you go on youtube economic video or an economic forum, where most people come for some kind of economic discussion, you already are submitted to a huge bias, as usually people working in economic related fields like banking frequents there.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia republicans have it very easy to tell blue collars that they get wage hikes because they are hard workers, but democrats are unable to convince blue collars that marcoeconomic circumstances strengthen their wage negotiations
Well considering my wages didn't move that much, my expenses went up even when I cut back, and the biggest goal post, buying a house, went from 5+ years out to now essentially impossible at current prices, and our plans to have kids went from "soon" to "probably never" because we couldn't afford a good life for our baby, I wouldn't say I am feeling any part of this "booming" economy.
And I think that's the main problem, not just in America either. As far as I can tell the American people aren't super aware of how badly the rest of the West's economies are doing and therefore how relatively successful Biden's handling of the US actually is, even if Trump's time looks better on paper because his period in office was generally more prosperous on a global level. But on comparable measures, things like unemployment have actually decreased to a fifty-year low of
The "Real wages" graph includes adjusting for inflation, i.e. cost-of-living expenses going up. Many individuals (like yourself) might have unfortunately seen their real wages drop, which sucks, but the overall average trend on that has been up and we're now above 2019 on that metric. However, I don't think real estate prices are factored into that as much as daily things like rent and food, so you're totally right that affordability of a house (something like real wage as a percentage of housing costs) has probably gone down.
Spot on comment. Other Western economies are doing EVEN WORSE. If you think the US is bad, it's quite impossible for any young adult in Canada to even hope for home ownership right now. And unlike the US, where there are plenty of places to pick up and go, all of this demand is concentrated in like 5 cities and their surrounding suburbs. Not to mention, prices are out of control. We're paid less than Americans, but pay more than them for basically everything. It's so bad. @@wastag9412
@@wastag9412 True, but even if they were, Americans don't measure their success against others but increasingly against their own past, real or imagined. It's really a study for behavioral economists moreso than traditional economists to be pursuing. Additionally, the numbers don't account for other emotional responses to the current market, such as the fact a lot of people like myself have now put off having kids even longer and possibly indefinitely. While economists don't care because all humans are essentially disposable cogs in a machine and they figure immigration will just cover whatever deficit in human capital emerges, for us actual people experiencing this brief life we have on this Earth it is pretty crushing to see your dreams essentially end all of a sudden. We can't get back time lost after our fertility fades afterall, and I have to spend an unknowable amount of time in the apartment we hate because we are lucky to have it at the current rent (for however much longer that lasts until we have to move again). That is what will make people see the economy in negative terms, because the economy isn't for my benefit at this point. I know Trump won't fix anything and would likely make it worse, these issues are systemic and are probably beyond anyone to fix even if they cared to.
@@wastag9412i said it and ill say if again the so called trump trade war was nothing but phony talk. Meanwhile Biden does it for REAL. Why do you think european countries are angry at Bidens inflation act??
actually yes.. if the inequality rate also increased .. then your GDP growth will be disconnect, as most of the growth probably fall only to a certain % of the individual
"Fantoomgroei" is a nice book about it. It talks about how the definition of GDP changed in the 70s, when financial institutions and their profits started counting towards GDP. Before that, only material goods and services (lumber production, healthcare, House building etc) counted towards real GDP. Since financial institutions and their profit margins started counting towards GDP, their respective slice of the economic pie has steadily been growing, and people's material prosperity has been steadily decreasing.
The impact is: when I pay an overdraft fee to the bank it is reflected in GDP because the bank has provided a financial service. Gotta feel good about that. Financial services are parasitic. They are effectively a tax on the productive economy, yet they are counted as GDP. And financial services have gone from 8% of US GDP to 21%. It's like a guy robs you and what he steals increases GDP. @@faijro9260
I don't think the graphs fully include the pressure of interest rates and price increases in specific sectors. Home prices skyrocketed during the pandemic and then interest rates went up significantly. Not too long ago, about 80% of Americans could afford the average home, now its just about 30%. This does not include the fact that the main things people buy and rely on, like food, gasoline, and rent, have skyrocketed while inflation in other things that were in the CPI, like electronics, went down in value. There are also lots of layoffs in high paying industries like tech while retail is seeing a rise in demand.
Yea its so misleading how they mix inflation up with other industries that have small or no infation....Where it matters most, housing, food and energy, those industries are seeing huge price increases, sometimes even double...SO I dont care what people say, it's a terrible economy.
They say food and energy are “too volatile” to include, and maybe that’s true depending on what you’re looking at, but if you need to buy any of that stuff, core inflation is basically ignoring reality for those getting squeezed to eat, drive, and stay warm.
I hope you know that home prices is a greed and capitalism problem. The only way to stop this is by having more regulation on the housing market or handling parts of it yourself just like Austria does. Trump would do the opposite of regulating the market more and would worsen the problem that the liberalist economist created
When you say “not too long ago, about 80% of Americans could afford the average home…“ How long ago was this? It certainly wasn’t during the Trump years. I’ve heard tell that a lot of what is going on with housing is not really a result of inflation but the rampant price gouging. Incidentally price gouging was huge during trumps tenure and I could easily make the argument that Biden was sabotaged by the centrists who sold out to the Republicans.
Do note that the negativity bias does not only relate to people choosing for negative news rather than positive news when given the choice, but also that when people hear both positive and negative news, they are more affected by the negative news than positive news.
In this case, I know the negative news, because I am the news. Because my mother tell me of her negative news. Because my neighbors, colleagues, friends and acquaintances all how bad news to tell. The only positive news are in the media and the data. The negative news are confirmed by personal experiences. I think the more accurate problem is the methodology to gauge this data had been faulty, and haven't yet up to date.
There’s a huge difference between ‘positivism’ and down-to-earth realism. GDP doesn’t tell much unless it’s broken down in reverse - where/for who(m) is growth happening, is it in the real or nominal part, how are ‘losses’ accounted for? Besides, the federal & national macroeconomic forces should include monetary moves such as QE (where, who, how long, how much). All this *before* political squabbles, just observable facts first. Then - possible policy solutions…?
Yeah, blue state NIMBY's are the main reason people are leaving blue states for red ones. But maybe that's bad for Republicans politically as these people move to red states and turn them purple
And yet, blue states generally have the highest rates of poverty, poor education, crime and bad health outcomes. Maybe it's a good thing for those states if a few people with resources move to their states and contribute. Not everything is Blue/Red. Sometimes it's just crap because the US won't implement the better option because they're so star-spangled "exceptional"... Grow up.
I'm not convinced of that. A lot of Republicans fear the same thing, but the idea that all Californians, for example, are vote D just isn't true. There's a lot of R there too, and those are the ones most likely to leave for Florida or Texas. I think what's going on is less a purpling of the US and more of a deeper polarization as the R and D have decided that the policies of the other are intolerable and joining their like-minded tribes. You can see this in how Texas and Florida are becoming more Republican, not less.
Why would a person be so upset about the outcome of policies they voted for, that they move to a new state BUT still vote for those same policies that made them leave the other state?!? Americans don’t make a lot of sense….😵💫
NIMBYism isn't just a blue thing. DeSantis and Abbot can easily cut off suburbs from all subsidies and outlaw single family zoning, if they wanted to, but have yet to do so.
The thing is, politicians have the incentive to promote GDP as the big number showing they’re doing a good job. That’s compared to the reality of prices rising and jobs not catching up.
I've seen data which breaks down real wage changes by percentile cohorts. While medium income earners saw their incomes stagnate, high earners' wages went down and low earner's wages actually went up. Those most benefitting from the booming economy may therefore simply be younger/busier/less politically engaged than your medium voter or survey taker. The other major factor, which you only sort of touch on here, is housing prices. While individuals' personal finances may be doing fine, the dream of homeownership has vanished entirely for many. I believe this alone could be enough to crush economic sentiment.
@@gmarefan my favorite part about the inflation hitting the western world right now is how my government thinks im not working class anymore lmfao.. ill never own a home but im middle class to them.. hell i cant even afford a car if mine breaks down
I was thinking this was left out as a factor. The middle seems to have completely stagnated. I am actually surprised to see the high income earners doing worse, but the middle seems to have certainly taken a hit. To be honest the best thing that middle income workers can do is probably take a new job. Unfortunately companies are not motivated to pay anyone more until they find an empty seat to fill.
That’s a bad thing. Medium and high income earners were the only ones able to buy homes and live good lives pre pandemic . Now poor people earn “good money” but it doesn’t buy anything. $20 an hour was enough to buy a home in 2019. Now it’s not enough to rent a studio apartment. Yes a cashier may earn 20$ an hour instead of 11$ an hour now but they can’t do shit with that. And now the 60k income earner can’t buy a home either. Nor can the 120k income earner. Everyone is screwed under Biden
It's easy. "The economy is booming" just means GDP line go up. But when the majority of the "line go up" is fueled by things like massive government investment in companies via mechanisms like the inflation reduction act (lol name), none of that GDP growth actually touches your average citizen. It's purely fueling companies and stock market numbers, while your average person is left to grapple with things like inflated grocery and home prices. More than ever there is a separation between 'the economy' as economists see it, and The Economy, as normal people experience it.
The whole discussion made me think of Goodhart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure." Policies are made to affect the metrics that will make it look like the economy is doing well. People don't pay attention to those metrics and they go off of how their spending is effected, their savings and how secure they feel at work. It's an experience i am sure many people have had where a doctor tells you, that you are fine but you don't feel fine.
well then if you have a problem, like inequality, then you can make inequality measures the new target, and inequality may get better with time. Or maybe the inequality measures does get better but then some other aspect of inequality worsen, or something like poverty, as if everyone is poor inequality will be lower. Got me thinking about if there is a solution to Goodhart´s Law, because one need observable benchmarks to work around
I think this is a bad take. GDP, unemployment rate, ... have consistently and historically been good measures on the overall health of the economy, and even though it is not perfect like everything else, they have generally been among our best measures. Also, because they are not perfect, we use them in conjunction to paint a better picture with multiple POV. If a doctor tells me I am fine, and you don't feel fine, you are welcome to get a second opinion, but if the second and third doctor also tells you are fine, then maybe you just have a vibe of not feeling fine.
@bachpham6862 gdp becomes an increasingly less reliable indicator as inequality grows, especially now that 1% of the population may now own 60% of the entire wealth in the US. Unemployment is also an unreliable indicator as it, according to my understanding, only counts those who are drawing upon unemployment benefits, and discontinues those who've reached their time limit in the system, and can no longer draw upon those same benefits, therefore no longer counted. Plus, like inflation, it is usually touted as a rate, and doesn't take account the accumulated charge or disruption. One becomes increasingly skewed towards the rich, the other doesn't account for accumulated disruption.
@@grasshopper8901 yes, and focusing on gdp creates concerns about environmental issues for example, with finite resources on earth, we cant just keep growing forever, more than growing redistribution seems to be more important for the already developed countries. Focusing on growth is the underlying cause for programmed obsolescence for instance, which is bad for the quality of the products been produced
Housing/rent, healthcare and higher education are through the roof, not to mention food prices. If your housing cost goes up 30% then stops going up is everything ok now? No, you've got to contend with that increase forever. If the price of a house goes up 20% do you pay 20% more? No, a lot more than that because interest rates have gone up too and over 30 years most of what you pay is interest. More jobs huh? Employment includes part-time. These are not real jobs with benefits and a future, and that's where most of the gains have come from. What the hell do I care what the government statistics say--or the media for that matter. I live in the real world.
Once your wages go up, the problem goes away. Whether the bills are $10 out of $100 income, or $20 out of $200 won't matter. It ends up at the same proportion.
Exactly. The Fed's proxy metric for an "overheating economy" is how many jobs were added, which includes shitty stuff like flipping burgers at McDonald's. How on Earth do people pay their bills with such "jobs"?
The aggregate numbers on economic performance grossly underweight the costs that are actually felt by the middle class, with housing being the worst offender. Economists say that I can't possibly be worse off financially now than I was in 2019. Well I am, and by a huge margin, because I don't own a house. I make a little more money, but the mortgage on the houses I could've bought back then has doubled. I have been priced out of living anywhere near my job, and this has had a very real negative impact on my life. The same problem is impacting everyone in the US who doesn't already own a home. I say this as a staunch Democrat who will not be voting for Trump. After all, the zero percent interest rates and trillions in government spending that kicked off this inflation nightmare started under his administration. Inflation always lags money printing by at least 9-12 months.
Trump's money printing is criticized by Republicans for being Democrat-lite. It would be funny that you want a full-blown Democrat who wants to print more money than Trump.
@@sanderwrong9106 historically speaking when we voting in a Republican to deal with inflation that gave us Ronald Reagan and the beginning of the end of the middle class and the massive exodus of manufacturing jobs to foreign Shores. Voting Republican will not work the way you think it will.
I'd love to see a video explaining how much of an economy can be influenced by a sitting president. Personally, I think we give these people way too much credit.
@@rrmackayEconomy is growing bigger to make debt manageable. Problem is, tax revenue is too small. Rich can hide behind tax shelters and tax loopholes.
@@rrmackay The Trump tax cuts massively increased debt, yet corporate profit went to stock buybacks instead of R&D or staffing increases. The money is there, but Congress refuses to cut debt.
@@richardarriaga6271 What a load of BS, congress has been spending like a ship full of drunken sailors for decades. The nation was already 20 trillion in debt when Trump came into office, Biden has increased the debt as much as it increased during Trump. Stop trying to pretend that its a partisan issue, its not, every congress spends too much. And US federal debt has nothing to do with corporate spending choices.
@rrmackay 2008 should have been wake up call to never vote for a Republican ever again. Tax cut and Deregulation don't work. Bush showed us, and that's why we had Obama for 8 years after the crash. All this inflation happened because of all the money that was given during Pandemic. Whether Biden or Trump was in office the inflation will still would have happened.
2008 should have been wake up call to never vote for a Republican ever again. Tax cut and Deregulation don't work. Bush showed us, and that's why we had Obama for 8 years after the crash. All this inflation happened because of all the money that was given during the pandemic. Whether Biden or Trump was in office, the inflation would still would have happened.
All I know is my household income was 58k a year with 2 jobs in 2018 (me and my wife.) And were fine. Now with 3 jobs at 110k, we did not move, stopped eating out 100%(2018 we used to all the time) havent had a vacation since 2021, and went from shopping at regular grocery to Aldis, and yet 110k is not enough anymore. Noting has changed since 2018. No bigger home. No bigger spending. Less spending actually in terms of real items and services. I have a budget tracker and can compare 12 mo period expenses. Groceries alone have gone up 6k in 12 momths. It now costs us more to eat at home than we used to spend eating out. We've gone from regular brand to store brand everything. We went from a new car, to a beat up subaru to cut out payments. At 58k, we were planninng and saving for a house. And were preapproved. We just needed the downpayment. Now at 110k, the bank says we can't afford a mortgage. Which is true. The lowest house would be a 3800 mortgage. And thats in the sticks. And my wife and I are working more than ever. From 70 hrs total between the two of us, to 100 hours between the 2 of us. And this is the state of everyone I know. I feel like the numbers don't really show that to achieve this "boom", the average American has had wages increase (sometimes) while their standard of living has decreased. Of course inflation is down. Because people cant afford it anymore. Economists seem to act like dropping inflation negates the inflation that already happened. My grocerys are still more than last year. The metrics are misleading. The bad stuff in the past, still effects us today. And all this is not taking into account the health insurance subsidies that are ending for lower income. Allot of people I know havent had to pay for insurance since the pandemic. That now kicks in this year.
If your groceries for two people has gone up $6k in a year without moving then you’re doing something horribly wrong. Hawaii has by far the highest grocery prices in this country and they average $7k a year per person. And a $3,800 mortgage even with bad credit and no down payment means, at lowest, the cheapest house you can find was $430k. That’s almost exactly the median house price in this country, but you can’t find a smaller house for cheaper? Depending where you live that could be right but I have my doubts.
Absolutely right. My income went up and standard of living went down. And just because the rate of inflation goes down doesn't mean prices have normalized. The economic boom is coming at the expense of working people. And the media is willfully ignorant.
@UpstateAlgaeLaboratory Inflation is the worst thing for the working class, who are hurt by higher prices more than anyone. The rich can invest their money and benefit from inflation. That's why any policies that are inflationary (too much gov't spending, protectionism) are not good.
@@williamfrost9910 But I would like to remind you that Republicans will not fix that. Republicans have historically always been antiworker. During the Trump years you saw workers wages increased by pennies and then stagnate by the end of the second year in office and this was before the pandemic.
The thing is US reported inflation numbers aren't reflecting what consumers feel on a day to say basis. Specifically they exclude food and fuel which have gone up in cost far more than the stuff that is counted in the CPI. As a data point, my food costs are about double what they were pre pandemic ( 4 years) which is vastly higher than the official inflation rate. Incomes aren't increasing at 20% levels, so of course it feels like your income went down every time you go to the store or eat out.
I've been out of work for over 3 months now. Not a lot of jobs compared to the number of people looking. All of them pay $40k to $50k less than I was making before.
There's been a record breaking number of new jobs created under the Biden Administration. And the unemployment rate is shockingly low. Biden has also strengthened Unions more than any other President since Ike.
This really depends on the sector and region. Where I am, jobs are outnumbering workers. I work with people looking for new jobs and unless they are in tech, there are lots of options, especially in blue collar jobs.
Exact opposite problem here in central Europe (Northern Italy, Austria, Southern-Germany). We have businesses closing down due to lack of employees. If you want a job and secure living conditions, move here. We are literally importing immigrants in buses from other countries to work for us.
Not really accurate to look at states when you're looking at partisanship in USA. We're split between urban and rural. Fact is its gotten way more expensive to live in cities because of housing. It kills any wage gains. I'd say thats why Democrats aren't so happy with the economy. The cost of everything in and around cities has gone up dramatically.
@@DoctorCyan That's a gross exaggeration. I live in a major city (Seattle). I moved to my current apartment in 2019. My rent (my biggest single expense) has gone up from $1900 to $2200, an increase of 15% in five years.
There’s an explosion of unmeasured economic activity post-pandemic. For example, accelerating trends of an ailing infrastructure combine to make forced commutes absolute hell…longer than they were pre-pandemic. That’s more fuel, car depreciation, and time. Add millions of stories like that to inflationary measures that don’t fully capture true human costs (e.g., some inflation stats don’t include interest payments), or sometimes even educational costs and the numbers begin to look comical. In many ways, things are worse than they’ve ever been…two salaries needed to support one family turned into two salaries needed to support a DINK couple living in a studio apartment, waiting for home prices to crash. Compare to a WWII veteran who went to college for free, and landed an AFFORDABLE starter home for his wife and 3 kids with a VA Loan…at the age of 26. So yeah…we’re pissed. And it’s insulting to suggest things are better than they’ve ever been.
@@greentoby26 you seriously think soldiers work for free? ... A more reasonable comment is "they also went to WWII". I would not trade the life I have now for one where I would have to go into a modern world war.
@@greentoby26 WWWII veteran is just an example. And the boomer generation mostly did not participate to any war, even less in the case of women... When that generation entered the workplace they were paid wages that were, on nominal terms, lower than those on offer today but allowed them to live much more princely lifestyles.
Blame the Republicans for their "trickle down economics", Trump's tax cuts for the rich, long expensive wars thanks to Bush Jnr and GOP removing regulations that favor corporations. All the gains in the stock market have now made the rich richer and the middle and lower classes poorer.
I’m a young guy who works part time at a large home building supply yard while I go to college. Wages have gone up significantly since the Trump years at my job place, but how much does that matter to young people if none of these guys can even dream of affording homes? They’re blue collar guys in a red state so most of them drive gas-guzzling trucks because it’s honestly a huge part of the culture, so huge jumps in gas prices have a huge effect on them. Even with the older guys who don’t have to worry about buying homes saw their 401ks take huge beatings when Biden was elected and haven’t really recovered in many cases. There are dozens of factors that can’t be simply reduced to “It’s Biden’s fault” but I think it’s fair to say that when I think of the economy it feels worse under Biden than Trump.
@0rtu_Solis that's because we are in a much worse and much more dangerous position now than under trump. Nothings gotten a whole lot better and the debt and problems are still there. Oh Yay unemployment went down probably because everyone needs extra money to get by or more than they needed before. Let's not even get started with the foreign policy which has left us on the brink of WW3.
The economy is booming for the rich and wealthy, not the working class. Wages are not increasing with the rising price of consumer goods, and housing is still as unaffordable as ever.
It is for the working class. I'm a manager. The pay for high school graduate technicians used to $18/hr in 2020, it grew to $23/hr in 2023, that's a 27.8% wage growth in 3-4 years. This is across my industry.
so, yes in fact the economy is improving under biden, but it is improving for the wrong "people". instead of improving for real people who really deserve all the riches in the world it is instead improving for those other "people" who did everything in their power to make the pandemic as bad as it could possibly, i blame the the automobile land hording parking lots.
My moms house is accruing more money each month in equity then I make … that’s ultra depressing to be honest. Like not every month but like going on Zillow and just checking is basically confirming I won’t own a home in the neighborhood I grew up in :(
My anecdotal beliefs as a middle class american living in a moderately sized city in a red state: Americans more than ever recognize there is no "meritocracy" in our economic system. Americans are concerned about the profits of their labor going to extraordinarily wealthy shareholders and executives, and being exposed to more and more regular waves of layoffs. Americans are more likely to be exposed to and affected by sensationalist and anecdotal news stories, and are less connected to the views and opinions of their peers. College educated Americans are spending more of their income on necessities such as rent and food, and the costs of luxury and recreational goods have spiked in cost making them proportionally much less accessible than they were before the pandemic. Finally, Americans are much more susceptible to "US centric" beliefs, and are less willing to be (or being capable of) comparing the state of the US economy to that of other western nations or other global powers than citizens of other peer nations. I appreciate the nuanced take this video has on the state of the economy as a whole versus the lived experiences of different segments of the US population.
American news has a big problem of using things that should be illegal in a fair playing field: - Inviting the "idiot of the day" to display the opposing viewpoint as ridiculous because the person invited is just a nobody with no logical ability - never "report" always "commentate". News sources often don't mainly say what's happening, they're mainly saying with a strong and confident tone what opinion they have about it. - never properly graphically expressing complex topics of ethical, economic, or scientific nature: can come in many forms, such as inaccurate headlines or using % and total amounts in misleading ways, but can also just be an inadequate connection of a given topic to true good aspects..
Being an immigrant Asian American, I strongly disagree that there is no "meritocracy" in the US economic system. It's far more meritocratic than most countries. To be slightly politically incorrect, I want to say that it's Asian Americans in general thinks that the average Americans have been too rich for too long and is too entitled. Many Americans complaining and protesting, while we Asian Americans spend our time studying and work. As it's a meritocratic system, Asians quickly rose past even White Americans to become the wealthiest racial group in the US. That's how merit base system suppose to work.
@@xiphoid2011 You're talking about personal experience and anecdote here. Data says otherwise: that it's harder than ever to achieve social mobility through education and work in the US, and that it's easier than ever for those who simply inherit (Trump made that even worse by raising the threshold for tax-free inheritance) or rely on their parents' connections. It's a complete reversal of the social contract expressed in the American dream: which is that anybody who works hard and succeeds academically/professionally can aspire to a better life, regardless of their parents' background.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgiaNobody gets rich immediately unless they get lucky. Families get richer through generational wealth as they accumulate wealth to pass onto their kids over multiple generations. Falling birth rates with the population growth primarily coming from immigration probably exacerbates that, as people don’t build generational wealth but just keep importing poor immigrants who’ll work for peanuts constantly.
I can't help but see the pointlessness of saying we are US centric. I have been very aware if Europe and other economy's struggling for a while. Honestly wish other Americans realized that too. I genuinely think nearly all developed nations are going through huge declines atm be it the economy or society. However just because Americans are way too focused at home dosent mean this country isn't in the gutter. Everywhere you look be it online or real life interactions everyone thinks the US economy and the country as a whole is in decline and getting worst by nearly every metric in the eyes of all people for various reasons. Nothing is getting better. The economy, society, infrastructure, quality of life, etc is collapsing for many Americans.
Great breakdown. I would add: First, economists in the US overemphasize core inflation, which ignores food and gas price fluxations, while for ordinary Americans, those price increases are the most important. Economists here are belatedly realizing that rising food prices lead to the expectation of higher inflation in the future, allowing sellers to raise their prices more than they could otherwise get away with. Second, Biden has failed to accomplish most of his core economic measures, from student debt forgiveness to a higher minimum wage to long term aid for families with children, due to Republicans in Congress and the Supreme Court blocking these. This leaves Democratic voters in a "he's a nice guy, but he didn't deliver" situation, depressing Democratic enthusiasm about the economy. Lack of confidence in Biden economically comes from both those who oppose his proposals, and those who support them and are disappointed they were not enacted.
Biden is also the one who pushed hard for the sanctions on Russia, gave Bibi a green card to do whatever, and so on ... so no, from an economic pov, he has been a disaster, it's just that ppl are digging into their savings, for a while .... while the federal gov is doing the same (by borrowing).
Of those to two factors I think food inflation is way more important. Not only do I spend more on food, but it is easier to drive less than it is to eat less. So given pressure, I eat food that is less prestigious and desirable. But that sort of substitution lessens the "inflation" of the food that I'd rather be eating. And lessens the value of making that substitution, as vegetables and grains become more expensive. In the past, I never ate hamburger - now I eat ground pork because it is significantly cheaper than hamburger. I'm getting more of an appreciation for Indian Cuisine. Hmm. I wonder why?
From my viewpoint, the economy sucks right now. Got laid off 3 months ago, credit cards maxed out, will have to sell our house next month if I can't find work. Thankfully, my resume is getting a few bites from employers, but there's a lot of competition in the job market. There are people far worse off than me, who haven't found work for 6 months or more. It's not good.
@Lateralus665 Yes, I finally got a job offer a few weeks ago, start working on Monday. Talk about a Thank you, Jesus! moment. 😂 Is it an ideal job? No - but close enough. A one year contract through a recruiting agency.
I think economics has a measurement problem when it comes to GDP. What you're measuring there is the level of monetization in the economy. Over time, and between economies, GDP does tend to correlate well with other forms of productivity. That does not imply that more GDP means a "better' economy in each and every occasion. (Unless you intend to represent solely the interests of financial institutions which have a much more direct relationship with GDP.) If a corporation judges its economic conditions by profit, so too do individuals. When you're judging the economy by survey, I think that data's going to correlate better with personal savings rate than GDP. This is at a long term low. I'd look at the costs of healthcare, education/training, housing, food, debt servicing as potential culprits. No one gets anywhere savings wise in a GDP optimized economy. It's borrow and spend. I think a more nuanced multi perspective analysis is required to see the problem with a booming economy for bankers.
Real GDP per capita accounts for these. You only need to check if they added the the costs you mentioned to the consumer basket that they used for calculating the inflation and that they are in the proportions you'd agree with.
True but as he mentioned the respondents in the survey also mentioned they felt we they were doing good even though their sentiment on the economy was overall negative.
@@prolarka science is a continuous debate, not a metric. Be honest about advocating for a zero savings zero social mobility economy when you've maxed out debt after targeting gdp for multiple generations The problem isn't inflation adjustment, it's the wrong target entirely. Gdp is precise and inaccurate, precision is insufficient here.
I'd say you definitely needed more attention on the realities of our trash housing market to really capture the despair. It doesn't really matter if your wages saw a marginal increase relative to inflation if your rent just went up 50%. The average American can't even _imagine_ saving up enough to get out of the renters trap, which is pretty much by definition squeezing as much as you can afford out of you regardless of how much you make.
My rent literally doubled the day my 1 year lease came up for renewal in Jan 2021, a 2 bedroom apartment went from $1300 to $2850 in a month. Had to move 50miles away to find rent I can afford in an old ugly apartment in a terrible part of town with an awful commute and I freaking hate it. All so I can save for a house I'll never be able to afford when the prices go up beyond what I can pay, again (houses were high 200s are now going for 600+). I work full time white collar work and part time at nights, so all these virtuous rich people saying we all don't work hard and don't deserve it can stuff it.
The biggest pressures not mentioned are the substantial increases in rents and mortgages causing cities to be nearly unlivable for the average wage worker, the rise in interest rates increasing said mortgages as well as car prices, which have also risen significantly even for used models. Combine this with the price of goods such as food and commodities, and the situation is more apparent. For the well off its no problem, taking the averages it seems great but wealth inequality is at an all time high, while the rich have gotten richer with corporations raking in record profits, the average wages for the former middle class have not increased nearly enough to catch up with these substantially increased costs of living.
For me, it feels like my middle class community in Mesa, AZ gauges the economy based on purchasing power determined by inflation we see at restaurants, grocery stores, and gas stations and how much their wages increased. If their overall purchasing power decreased, even with a booming economy, it feels like the economy is suffering, because that's the most important relevant economic factor to them personally.
Idk about anybody here but according to many of my relatives it doesn't feel like they're being misinformed by the media. Everything's more expensive & their wages have barely budged
I think a major part of the disconnect is that economists use poor, obsolete metrics. Things like the standard unemployment rate, despite the economy having changed by changes in labor participation rates, the rise of gig jobs, and much more time being spent in tertiary education. Why is the analysis based on average real wages of those employed, instead of median wage of all those folks who could be working? It seems like income based on government largess is less valuable that income based on a good job, because it can disappear by arbitrary government policy changes. Also, folks can factor in global political situation into their evaluations on how the economy is doing.
@@richdobbs6595 Inflation, labor participation, interest rates, CPI, the stock market, all of these indicies are trying to apply simple numbers to an immeasurably complex economic picture.
@@AaronMichaelLong True, but what is your point? Are you agreeing or disagreeing? Is this the best set of indices, or just relics? The universe is immeasurably complex, but engineers evolve to better designs over time. At least in theory, doctors use better medicine and diagnostics over time. Has there been an equivalent improvement or breakthrough in econometrics?
@@richdobbs6595 Economics is not engineering. Neither is politics. These... pursuits do not yield unambiguous empirical data the way disciplines underpinned by chemistry and physics do. It is my position that these measures are just as flawed as the rest of the economic craft, which is a discipline thronged with ideologues and motivated reasoning. When you analyze the economy from the perspective of a rational participant, you come to starkly different results from those displayed in the real world, because people *aren't* rational. The implication of Goodhart's Law is that there is *NO* actionable measure, because the act of implementing a policy which hinges on it distorts the utility of the measure, and corrodes the intended effect of the policy. I first came to Goodhart's law in technology, where my earliest jobs were in call-centers. The operators were measured by the number of calls taken per hour, this motivated them to come up with whatever pretext to terminate the call as swiftly as possible. You know, "Restart your router, then call us back." The result was that the actual objective, providing customer service, went to the wall for the sake of the metric. You see this all the time in business. An executive or manager comes up with a set of metrics, the staffers come up with ways to game the metric, and the actual objective the metric was trying to achieve suffers. Why should monetary or government policy be any different?
Yep. I'm glad that they managed to keep inflation way down compared to the rest of the world. Sadly, i don't think a lot of people have that perspective.
I work for minimum wage. This a wage that is not liveable despite it being given to an extremely generous portion of the population. I am disabled and cannot find a "better" job than customer service. I am lucky to have a room cheap enough to rent. I could easily be one of the many, many homeless people dying on the streets. No aid, no mercy. So no, I am not feeling this "great" economy, by design. I can barely afford groceries as it is. Forget emergencies or retirement.
On a purely cynical point of view, having to deal with a economic crisis like 2008 and 2020 is much better than having to deal with high inflation. An economic crises only affects people losing their job, and on a plus side governments have to undertake extreme measures that are going to be remembered for decades with little to no opposition. On the other hand, high inflation affects everybody, poor middle class, rich, super rich, nobody likes going to the grocery stir and seeing price raising. And the point is that, even if you receive a raise to keep up with inflation, you’re going to think that the raise was your merit, while you’re not going to think that you’re part of the inflation problem. It’s like being on a traffic jam: you don’t think you’re part of the traffic.
Good take! Except…if you’re the person losing their job, or their house, and possibly their home equity. 🫤 Part of the problem is that people are using the wrong terms. Just saying the economy is not specific, rather people should reference the interest rate or the unemployment rate or the consumer price index. The latter, the CPI did spike this past year or so, and that’s what people are feeling. Yet unemployment is historically low, and the stock market and GDP are trucking along. Personally, I’d rather be challenged with temporarily high prices than lose my job, then you’re SOL and nothing is manageable! 🫤💩
I think people that got financial breathing room for the first time in years during the pandemic (student loan pause, rent assistance, unemployment, child tax credit, etc) and then going back to their pre-pandemic working conditions plus effects of inflation is the pain people feel. Many people went from living with dignity back to toiling and now recognize their old life for what it was - unacceptable exploitation. Edit: and now that people are reacclimated to their lifestyle it's going back up.
I can tell you from my own family's experience, it's the higher interest rates that are causing all the pain on both the home ownership front as well as the cost of running a business.
sad part is higher rates weren't even necesarry. Most of the inflation was supply driven and sorted itself out as supply bottlenecks unwound. We couldn've seen the same level of inflation with much lower rates like Japan
Rates might be higher, but from a historic perspective, they’re not high. They’re rather in line with normal historic rates (not too high, not too low). It’s just that they were kept so low (near 0) for so long post-Great Recession that people came to expect near 0 rates.
Mortgage rates fell massively for 32 years. That entire drop was a one time event. The "era" of cheap capital for homes is over. If you got to participate in that ponzi scheme you're sitting pretty, if not, normal economics is going to feel pretty painful.
@@SamuelClemens-o6q if they got to participate and had the foresight of opting for a fixed rate mortgage, if they thought taking a variable rate mortgage was worth the point or so lower, then they’re in trouble.
1.) GDP is a poor measure of economic growth. GDP includes $3T of federal government deficit spending in the years 2022 and 2023 which is really a liability not an asset. 2.) My insurance costs went up 25%. My food costs went up 20%. My housing costs went up 10%. I need these three items to survive. My income went up zero percent. I am working more and earning less due to working off of the clock. 3.) The better measure of the economy is GDI - Gross Domestic Income, not GDP - Gross Domestic Product. 4.) The M2 money supply has plunged.
The problem is that people just accept that price increases are inflation and pay it. But prices are set by the market, not costs. If prices go up too high, you’re supposed to buy something else until the price goes back down. If McDonalds can make more profits by selling hash browns for $3, they should. This isn’t inflation, it’s the basis for free-market economics.
@@DoctorBiobrain Yeah, we're told their costs are going up, but a lot of companies have record profits, which means they're charging more to charge more.
McDonalds just reported a loss in q4. Part of the reason is that they lost the "Value" clients because of the price hikes. They miscalculated the pricing of their products.@@DoctorBiobrain
The potato crops had some issues in 2023 due to rare weather events but 2024 should be better. Remember the issue with Eggs last year? It happens from time to time with agriculture
@@DoctorBiobrain Except in America, your daily necessities are made by 1 of 2 players who hold 90% of the market. For food, almost all the supply of a food (say, chicken) is in the hands of maybe 4 or 5 conglomerates. McDs isn't lying to you, they're really jist passing on costs. It's just that America doesn't have markets, it has cartels for virtually everything because the US government wants corps big enough to run their neoliberal BS in small countries.
I'm Irish, so this might effect how I view things, but I was reading a piece about how the Irish economy was doing great because unemployment is low and real wages are rising. And what I think is happening is that a lot of the dissatisfaction with the economy is to do with infrastructure and service provision. Like it doesn't matter if you've a good job and lots of money if you're stuck in traffic because cars are clogging up the bus system and there's no trains. Infrastructure and service provision don't get measured in many of these statistics so it goes unnoticed but I think it might be at the root of the problem.
The reason people complain about Gas is because they buy fucking SUV/Trucks, which are going to have poor mileage and then complain about prices as they have to refill more. Medical cost is up to congress to pass something but Republicans don't want to change it and Dems don't have enough support for a public option.
Nice look at a deeper dive! I’m wonder why one would be optimistic about a lowering inflation rate at this point though? The prices aren’t going back down, and our wages won’t be going up. How is that not going to mean permanently putting people into a harder time than they used to be in?
After 2020, many Americans went nuts and decided crime is acceptable. The crime rate in Democratic cities has skyrocketed and many things that before were considered crimes have been decriminalized. The consequence is that wealthy people have fled these cities in mass and have gone to the cities in the red states leading to a housing cost shock in these cities. Californians and New Yorkers complain about the increase in crime (which leads to higher costs of living) while Floridians and Texans complain about the sudden increase in the price of housing. These are the most populous states in the union by a big margin so I am singling them out.
See what you are not looking at is inflation is a slope or rate of change, not a value. So when cash liquidity went up and businesses increased prices in response, wages did not keep up with the increased prices.
That is a mega/super-duper official statistic...real inflation is closer to 40%. The trifecta that makes up most of the budget in a household (housing, transport, and food) are up 25% to 40% in most places. They are learning to do propaganda with statistics.
@@jeremytine rents, food, house prices are all up about 40% ...car price inflation is in the upper 20s%... Insurance is up about 100% in many places...wages are up about 15% to 20%. So you did get that last part right. The only people that think inflation is anywhere near the "official numbers" are people living in very high cost of living places that have stagnated because of how expensive they were to begin with.
@@borikero1 citation needed, not the numbers I see when i looked it up. Also, you said "inflation" not cherry picked and lying stats. Cars for instance starting going high with covid due to chip shortages and had little to do with Biden. Covid absolutely caused a global inflation. USA is actually doing well comparatively. For instance,"rent" according to bureau of labor statistics, since covid rent has gone up 5.22% on avg per year. the previous 4 years(Trump) was 3.56%, so a net difference of a 1.66%/year. And what was the avg rent inflation under Obama/Biden for 8 years?2.52% EDIT: insurance up 100%? yeah BS. Auto insurance on avg rose 31% 2013-2023 or 3.1%/year also from according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Thanks once again for a great video! One thing that you might want to look at are the average savings and debt levels. People are digging into their savings and going into debt to continue their lifestyle, pushing the growth of a primarily consumption driven market. I wonder if that might have consequences down the line, if people don't get back to earning sustainably soon.
I haven’t finished the video but my guess is going to be that average debt has significantly increased which explains why people don’t feel like they are getting ahead, they are just getting back to where they should have been.
I think one important thing to note is that yes, the rate at which inflation is increasing has slowed. But the damage has already been done and crawling wage growth just has even more to catch up on now. Cost of living is just strangling everyone, look at credit utilization rates
I think it's worth noting on the media side that there is kind of an asymmetry in partisan media in the US. Major conservative media is more willing to stump for Trump through thick and thin, while major liberal media tends to not want to appear as partisan and therefore isn't going to run puff piece stories about Biden doing a great job on the economy. So liberal media sort of tends to report negatively for both, while conservative media will have Trump's back while he's in power, which affects perceptions.
You really are living in your own bubble if you believe that. If you start looking at what people of other policial persuations think, they are very convinced that liberal US media is extremely one-sided and non-liberal media is much more nuanced. The truth is that your brain has a bias to find whomever you agree with to be reasonable and nuanced and whomever you disagree with to be partisan and singleminded. As someone not even from the US I find that reading liberal US media has felt like reading pure political propaganda since Trump was elected. I will say that liberal US media seems more critical of Biden in particular than non-liberal media has been with Trump, so since 2021 it's been somewhat bettered.
I don't know, I've also seen liberal media cover for Biden and conservative media criticize Trump. I've found both sides seem to complain that "their side" is fractured while the "other side" is united. I think this is due to the natural bias that comes with knowing the nuances of your own "side" better. Republicans generally don't know or care about the differences between Intersectional Feminists, Environmentalists, and Moderate Liberals. Likewise Democrats generally don't know or care about the differences between Christian Nationalists, Libertarians, and Neocons. So each group ends up viewing the other as a threatening monolith.
Inflation seems to be a lot higher than what is reported by the government so there is a perception that wages have not caught up yet for most people. Also, it doesn't help that mortgage interest rates are higher than they have been in over a generation despite sticky home prices not dropping to compensate - this locks a lot of people out of the housing market regardless of whether wages have actually kept up with the fake inflation stats.
Because government measures the rate of inflation increase. Since it's already been high, the effect of the high has already diminished the value of the currency
It doesn’t matter how good the numbers look, layoffs are wide spread, wages are down compared to massively inflated prices and that makes it impossible to save or even buy anything.
I’d argue that because of the mass layoffs in tech, tech workers have a negative view toward the economy, and those who are involved in tech have more influence on the internet, thus swaying the general sentiment of the economy
I've always thought unemployment figures from USA are a bit.. off, with good reason. In Europe and many other parts of the world, if you can't work for whatever reason you are supported by the state, in the USA you are barely supported by the state for a very limited amount of time so you'll end up homeless and homeless people don't count towards unemployment stats...
That is wrong. Unemployment figures from any country (not just the US) generally dont include people who dont search for a job. Youre mixing it up with the labor force participation rate. Please educate yourself.
it also doesn’t include people with fragile part-time jobs that could disappear at any moment. sociologists these days use “underemployment” as a better measure, but i see economists are still behind
It also doesn’t help that we are still coping with the after effects of inflation. My household income increased 50%, but it doesn’t feel like much when everything costs 10% more. So it’s also sticker shock. And a lot of the democratic voter base is in this position. Wages might be going up but we’re lucky if we’re doing better.
Same here. Got a promotion and a 30% raise two years ago, I have never had less money in my pockets, had never had to take money out of my savings so many months in a row. It is depressing. Had to buy a new fridge, they have gotten so expensive! We want to have a car, but it is unaffordable! Feels like I do everything I am supposed to do, work hard, get a good job, get promoted, and Im still at the same spot financially that I was 5 yeras ago.
Media is responsible for a big part of people's opinion. Every Conservative changed their opinion about the economy overnight when Biden was elected. But economies don't change overnight!
I'm in my 50's and the last time that inflation was a problem I was around 10. No one under 60 in the United States experienced inflation as an adult. It's not just that it's bad it's also new
it isnt booming for my family.. we are pretty frugal ppl, we are managing but it is stressful... regular goods doubling in some cases.. when you go to pretty much any store you can hear people are in either same or worse shape, but they are talking about it out loud in the grocery store.. blaming it on the media is the lamest excuse ive ever heard, its gaslighting..
Kinda....right the problem is we dont have real good memories. Remember inflation grows at around 2% every year so inflation is relative view point. This is kinda shown in the fact that the study participants in large were happy about their pay and were some what optimistic even though they responded with negative sentiment. The vibesession is because while prices are higher, they will always be higher but people complain about it more. The mere fact that people attribute every rise in cost to a president and not to the store or merchant is a good example that we mostly just vibe when it comes to complex things like an economy.
@@bradleywhite6815 what we are experiencing is a change in the world order.. our entire monolithic western world order was predicated on cheap energy, cheap debt and the ability to project influence.. these are trending in the reverse as we are beginning to see. we could have enacted polices decades ago to reduce the impact of these changes but we didnt.. now we get to deal with consequences of a new reality that western world order assumed would never come to fruition.. to claim its just the media, or look at this graph its not that bad.. is gaslighting people.. the thing is people notice and they arent happy.
I think relative to the pandemic there is a good amount that is perception but i do think sentiment is more negative generally because of the fact there are many items which have overpriced now. You have the big three, wages not keeping up with inflation, houses more expensive, college more expensive.
There is evidence that poor economic sentiment is often followed by an actual economic decline. This has occurred several times in the last 50 years. I am uncertain why, but it could be that a poor economic normally hits people before the numbers reflect it. AS for MSM influence, this is only the case if there is a lack of alternative views in the media, which is not the case right now. It may have been when the MSM dominated the news, but this is not the case anymore. AS for political polarization, this may be the case but as this this video shows this always occurs. I feel the theory in this video may well be accurate. I also suspect a lot of money is flowing from red to blue states, which is likely due to high crime as much as zoning restrictions. The zoning restrictions have always been an issue, so you need to identify what has changed in the last 8 years. Crime and poor economic management and an influx of illegal immigrants which saturate public services is the likely causes. Regardless poor economic sentiment is often used as an early indicator of economic issues and whatever the reason is, of which I do not know, I suspect this is what I would focus on.
I'm surprised he states mainstream media as responsible for building the image of a bad economy. The likes of CNN for example are always blowing the trumpet of Biden and the Fed's successes.
The cost of housing in Florida is worse than any other state and the statistics on homless people in Florida are not collected to be accurate. Desantis has appointed cronys in every part of the state government. He broke Rick Scotts' record as governor for the number of people he appointed to state positions who had donated to his campaign or pac. If you look in the wooded areas around every town in Florida there are mass amounts of homeless encampments/people and due to Fl not offering social safety net programs these people are not accounted for in statistics used for calculating poverty or homelessness. Even without the state participating in good faith with the production of data, Florida has been identified as the state with the most regressive tax system inspite of how DeSantis controls the data experts have access to. In spite of this Florida has also been identified as the state with the worst wealth inequality and highest inflation. If you don't think DeSantis would play with data so it makes his governance(or lack thereof) look better... look at DeSantis's hand picked Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo who was caught red handed alterning the data to fit his conclusion for a study on the side effects of MRNA covid vaccines. Ladapo was not even reprimanded, where as in nearly any other state he would have been fired. DeSantis hired him for the sole purpose of helping to spread vaccine disinformation, which DeSantis used as part of his Presidential Campaign.
Please use time costs over inflation and wages. Or at least include them alongside. They normalize out alot of weirdness into a more clear echinomic metric of the average work hours needed to buy something. It also allows to clearly account for people in different economic brackets and how the prices of things affect them. Which is an insanely hard thing to get an estimate for using wages and "inflation". Time costs are insanely powerful in how useful they are. As an example the book "super abundance" has alot of uses of time costs. In that book it is used to compare present day with historical to see how things have changed from a "how easy are things to get" point of view. And it also has an explaination... its mostly a book of time cost data with a title based on what the data ended up showing.
Simple answer, the data is rigged. Once you break down the statistics the claims by the Biden admin don't hold water. For example the jobs numbers. Full-time employment has nose dived while part-time and government jobs skyrocketed to fill the gap. This commonly happens when entering a recession. Particularly bad when government exceeds 10% of new hires which is currently exceeding 25% in the last report. A lot of indicators towards a recession have been raising alarm bells. People have been heavily drawing on credit. The stock market has seen extreme divergences that haven't corrected yet. The banking crisis is still ongoing and currently we are seeing the commercial real estate pop.
My own personal experience is my groceries have doubled since covid while my pay has barely moved about 14%. That and my hours got cut, so I actually make less than 5 years ago. 3 income houses are becoming a thing.
It’s most likely social inequality the economic stimulus, and the fed being the savior of the economy, for the past 20 or so years, has caused asset prices to substantially rise. Those without assets have seen their share of wealth decrease substantially relative to the top 1 % and most likely will continue. Not an easy fix to this issue.
10:14 it’s incredible that political affiliation can have such a giant influence on the way people perceive the economy… it really is all just feelings
Not really at all. GDP isn’t really an accurate predictor of economic success anymore. In cities like New York condemned buildings are valued at over a million and even if you earn six figures you’ll barely be able to afford rent let alone fit in as “middle class.” All this “so-called” growth isn’t really being felt among average consumer who had taken note of how prices have risen while rages have stagnated.
The impact of skyrocketing costs of a) a college education, and b) housing in America, cannot be overestimated. They are both now unaffordable for the working classes.
These have problems long before the pandemic. Housing supply crashed and never recovered from the great recession and higher education and medial costs have been terrible for decades.
A lot of this is about healthcare, housing, gas prices, and food. Healthcare and housing are long-standing complicated issues, but gas prices and food are sufficiently volatile enough that they may experience deflation in the short term. If oil prices drop, food will probably follow. But right now, a lot of that seems to be dependent on the situation in the Gulf of Aden. Even with housing, it is possible the market will experience a large price drop or crash given that there are considerably fewer buyers. Alternatively, we can figure out ways to ensure reasonable access to necessities like healthcare, housing, food, and transportation without being at the mercy of the "market".
Viewing any problem through the arbitrary restriction of only red and blue filters removes so much of the visual spectrum humans would normally use to illuminate a topic of study. Also, can you point us at an affordable home...asking for a friend.
Prices have increased 20 percent, mortgage rates up 5%, rent up 25% in the past 4 years, so economic pain in terms of family budgets is also an important factor influencing swing state voters.
What inflation indicator does the real wage chart use? For most people it feels like real wages have decreased even more than that. If that chart does not include housing then it is really missleading.
Housing costs hasn't really gone up for people that already owned their house. The problem is for renters and people wanting to buy a house, but that isnt as many people.
@@Carewolf 36% of people in the US rent, plus a lot of people who own, bought recently, lets say 10% (dont have data on that) which means they bought at already quite high prices and probably have large mortgages in proportion to their incomes. Plus a proportion of people had to or will have to move and re-finance at high rates, lets say 5%. That is around half the country who is struggling with higher housing costs, in addition to higher cost of living. And it is mostly younger people who are already dissilutioned with Biden for other reasons.. Indicators really should include inflation in asset prices as well as consumer prices. It is misleading that many of them dont.
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There's two housing markets. People who bought pre mid-pandemic who were able to buy their house for 70% (or less) of what it costs today and got a super low interest rate , and people who didn't. People who didn't, renters or those who were too young to buy, have gotten screwed. They'd need their pay to nearly double to have the same buying power they had 4 years ago. That's just in housing and doesn't factor in huge increases in food and vehicles.
All of these metrics depend on how you measure inflation. If you tweak the inflation formula to make the numbers look better than they are, there will obviously be a disconnect between public sentiment and the published data. For example, if my housing, food and energy cost rise substantially, it doesn't matter if consumer electronics or other goods fall in price because I wont have the disposable income to buy them. The weights in the CPI are incongruent with the actual public experience and I think public sentiment for economic wellbeing likely weighs necessary expenses like food, housing, and energy as the strongest factors. Additionally, inflation rate as a whole is hard for people to understand because it is a derivative. If we assume wage inflation over the past 6 months has matched real inflation over that same time frame, people are not better off. They are just not worse off than at the start of the 6 months. If wage inflation lagged real inflation over the 6 months preceding, then people would still be worse off now than they were a year ago despite the improvement in wage inflation over the most recent 6 months. In order to get back to the quality of life from a year ago, we would need wage inflation to exceed real inflation which we have yet to see. People act like wage inflation keeping up with real inflation is some great gift and everyone should be more grateful for it when in reality it should be the bare minimum.
German here. We're not optimistic about our economy. It went downhill so fast and government is in gridlock because of right wing trolls being so powerful at the moment, that it's impossible to do something about it.
We knew those official statistics would turn to 💩 as soon as they decided to change the definition of a recession to avoid saying we were in one 🤡🤡😂😂. We are definitely in uncharted territory, we don't even know what territory we are in anymore.
The way inflation is measured is a poor indicator of prices. Hypothetically, if prices double (so a 100% increase) in 2022 and then remain elevated without changing (0% increase) in 2023, economists will say inflation is 0% when in reality it went up 100% in 2 years. This is why Americans are unhappy with the economy because the prices of almost everything have gone up significantly and now have stayed elevated.
*The govt folks don't care about the recessions or inflations of the country, it's you being adamant to the strategies of survival of the nation investments are the only way out of this treacherous economy Trade wisely not supermly 😶🌫️ They're no poverty insurances*
You're right! It's important for everyone, especially those approaching retirement to have multiple streams of income, this way, during retirement, you can enjoy the benefits of your investments.
*I've remained in touch with a financial analyst since the start of my business. Amid today's dynamic market, the key difficulty is pinpointing the right time to buy or sell when dealing with trending stocks - a seemingly simple task but challenging in reality. My portfolio has grown by more than $600k within just a year, and I've entrusted my advisor with the task of determining entry and exit points.*
All I have to say is that big companies like the one I work for have dropped almost all their contractors in the past two years. This doesn't impact the companies' unemployment numbers, but it is a large number of people who can't find jobs or have to accept lower paying contracts now.
Excellernt explaination. I'm a Asian American immigrant in the booming state of Texas, so I'm politically centrist. I can see how pro-business Repblican policy is a big reason for Texas:'s success, but I also see some extremist Rublican ideas like abortion ban is just not right. But as almost everyone around me is working and making good money, I don't understand how some still claim the economy is bad while I'm handing them big annual raises and even bonuses. Your video explains a lot! Two thumbs up.
You’re working a nice white collar job. Nearly every other company, especially the big ones, haven’t given out bonuses to the average employee in years. The biggest are cutting staff to make themselves look good to shareholders.
"Extremist", AKA not killing babies as early as a few blue states, despite their laws being more in line with the rest of the world then abortion until birth laws.
A final point missed is about the matter of expectation: The baseline expectation became the post pandemic new reality of wages that were nominally sometimes 20% higher and government UBI that crushed poverty and drastically reduced inequality. The only satisfying conclusion to the pandemic rebound would have been if those new realities had been made permanent, ie permanent ongoing UBI and a permanent labor "shortage" with "super" wages.
People have to understand that GDP has no correlation to how well people are doing. I GDP is high no matter if wealth is hyper concentrated or more fairly distributed.
People are running out of their spending power! Credit card debt bubble, housing and student loans as well as medical debt all nearing all time highs! With all of that there’s inflation which has raised the prices of essential goods! That’s why people feel that there will be a stagnation in the economy in near future! Because people will only barely afford essential goods and demand will drop thus growth of companies will suffer as a result!
The complaints people have about the economy won't be improved under Trump. It's similar to Brexit in 2016, when people couldn't name a concrete improvement to their lives that leaving the EU would bring. It was an emotional decision, based on anger and destruction. The result has been carnage, far lower quality of life, and with the opposite effect the promised improvements (more immigration, worse trade agreements, loss of net wealth). Being angry at the Democrats and Biden is not the same as having concrete solutions to these issues.
Leaving EU is less regulation. I know how many useless laws were added in Poland because of EU laws. Laws for small business (which are pain in the a..) and for big businesses (which is driving cost of everything up). Most known are higher mandatory insurance/taxes for older cars, higher price of houses because of buying contracts for co2 emission for steel, concrete, electricity, more expensive food because of regulations for farmers (look at the last couple years of them protesting in Brussels for many different reasons). There is a lot of treat specific costs for doctors, pharmacist, building companies etc. To much to count.
So many comments saying something to the effect of "those economy numbers aren't relevant, real americans are stuggling to get by!". Did you not see the part where people are rating their own financial situation favourably? This is literally the crux of the mystery.
People always overvalue themselves both good and bad. People think they make above average mistakes, they think they are of above average intelligence, they think they lie more than other people, and they also think they are doing better economically than the average person. That statistic in and of itself is not really relevant.
Also, most of the economic boom is happening in Red States, so people there will most likely have a feeling of “we’re succeeding in spite of Biden, not because of”, hence why they think they’re doing well personally but think the overall economy is bad (which given the universal stuff like inflation for many years very much hits). And hell, if Red States do better than Blue States, then that means Republican policies lead to more economic growth than Democrat policies. Why wouldn’t people want to vote in the working policy?
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Thank you for this video . I absolutely love a comment section that isn't overrun with hateful trolls too. I'm definitely subscribing to your channel 👍
Is it just me or did the doc look much slimmer than he does in the earlier vids.
I think you made mistake in overlooking psychological aspect of your video. People struggling financially will hear from you that it is not so bad and negative outlook is caused by: media bias, political view and they are not seeing that economy improved already in past couple quarters. What they will feel?
Can you convince someone who defaulted that it is all good? Not really, they will be angry and they will be more likely to write comment about it than people happy with economy situation.
Could you avoid this? Maybe... but you would need to make it far longer than 17 min video and touch topics of defaults, new hires, layoffs, changing one full time job to couple part time, gig jobs, workforce share in income, using median values everywhere and talk about distribution of that data.
Then you would need to address popular arguments for weak economy: real GDI Vs real GDP, workforce participation, drop in full time jobs, inconsistent and less trustworthy government data (a lot of revisions in one direction and moving people from workforce in spikes, regional PMIs inconsistent with national level) etc
It would be complicated, long video. Maybe it is worthwhile or maybe this whole topic is landmine.
I think you made mistake in overlooking psychological aspect of your video. People struggling financially will hear from you that it is not so bad and negative outlook is caused by: media bias, political view and not seeing that economy improved already. What such will feel?
Can you convince someone who defaulted that it is all good? Not really, they will be angry and they will be more likely to write comment about it than people happy with economy situation.
Could you avoid this? I'm not sure. Maybe... but you would need to make it far longer than 17 min video and touch topics of defaults, new hires, layoffs, changing one full time job to couple part time, gig jobs, workforce share in income.
Then you would need to address popular arguments for weak economy: real GDI Vs real GDP, workforce participation, drop in full time jobs, inconsistent and less trustworthy offical data (a lot of revisions in one direction and moving people from workforce in spikes, regional PMIs inconsistent with national level) etc
It would be complicated, long video. Maybe it is worthwhile or maybe this whole topic is landmine.
I think you made mistake in overlooking psychological aspect of your video. People struggling financially will hear from you that it is not so bad and negative outlook is caused by: news bias, political view and not seeing that economy improved already. What such will feel?
Can you convince someone who defaulted that it is all good? Not really, they will be angry and they will be more likely to write comment about it than people happy with economy situation.
Could you avoid this? I'm not sure. Maybe... but you would need to make it far longer than 17 min video and touch topics of defaults, new hires, layoffs, changing one full time job to couple part time, gig jobs, workforce share in income.
Then you would need to address popular arguments for weak economy: real GDI Vs real GDP, workforce participation, drop in full time jobs, inconsistent and less trustworthy data (a lot of revisions in one direction and moving people from workforce in spikes, regional PMIs inconsistent with national level) etc
It would be complicated, long video. Maybe it is worthwhile or maybe this whole topic is landmine.
From what I observed, if you look at the employment data, you will see that in Biden's economy, the majority of the gains are for blue collar workers in manufacturing and healthcare. In contrast, the majority of the losses are white collar workers in tech and finance, both suffers from high interest rate and layoffs. Not to mention this also affect recent college graduates who struggle to find jobs. This group is relatively more represented in our media, both social and mainstream.
Services industry (restaurant and hotels especially) also so wages spike. There was a massive number of layoffs, followed by a rush to hire people back. I saw gas stations and pizza parlors with signing bonuses locally.
For one glorious quarter, the wages for Services Industries like Hospitality rose faster than those of Bankers :)
Why isn't this being reflected in voting patterns and polls for Democrats? Also white collar workers vote and pay taxes too, it's madness to dismiss their experience as a distortion of reality.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia But it did: Democrats won a lot of key local elections recently last November (or at least was not completely wiped in solid red states and districts). Not to mention Democrats are reporting much better fundraising. As for polling, the video gave a theory for it already. Also I never said that I dismiss white collar workers and if you think so, your english reading comprehension is the issue. If you go on youtube economic video or an economic forum, where most people come for some kind of economic discussion, you already are submitted to a huge bias, as usually people working in economic related fields like banking frequents there.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia republicans have it very easy to tell blue collars that they get wage hikes because they are hard workers, but democrats are unable to convince blue collars that marcoeconomic circumstances strengthen their wage negotiations
Cyclical layoffs should be illegal, but in tech it's standard practice.
Well considering my wages didn't move that much, my expenses went up even when I cut back, and the biggest goal post, buying a house, went from 5+ years out to now essentially impossible at current prices, and our plans to have kids went from "soon" to "probably never" because we couldn't afford a good life for our baby, I wouldn't say I am feeling any part of this "booming" economy.
And I think that's the main problem, not just in America either. As far as I can tell the American people aren't super aware of how badly the rest of the West's economies are doing and therefore how relatively successful Biden's handling of the US actually is, even if Trump's time looks better on paper because his period in office was generally more prosperous on a global level. But on comparable measures, things like unemployment have actually decreased to a fifty-year low of
The "Real wages" graph includes adjusting for inflation, i.e. cost-of-living expenses going up. Many individuals (like yourself) might have unfortunately seen their real wages drop, which sucks, but the overall average trend on that has been up and we're now above 2019 on that metric. However, I don't think real estate prices are factored into that as much as daily things like rent and food, so you're totally right that affordability of a house (something like real wage as a percentage of housing costs) has probably gone down.
Spot on comment. Other Western economies are doing EVEN WORSE. If you think the US is bad, it's quite impossible for any young adult in Canada to even hope for home ownership right now. And unlike the US, where there are plenty of places to pick up and go, all of this demand is concentrated in like 5 cities and their surrounding suburbs.
Not to mention, prices are out of control. We're paid less than Americans, but pay more than them for basically everything. It's so bad. @@wastag9412
@@wastag9412 True, but even if they were, Americans don't measure their success against others but increasingly against their own past, real or imagined. It's really a study for behavioral economists moreso than traditional economists to be pursuing.
Additionally, the numbers don't account for other emotional responses to the current market, such as the fact a lot of people like myself have now put off having kids even longer and possibly indefinitely. While economists don't care because all humans are essentially disposable cogs in a machine and they figure immigration will just cover whatever deficit in human capital emerges, for us actual people experiencing this brief life we have on this Earth it is pretty crushing to see your dreams essentially end all of a sudden. We can't get back time lost after our fertility fades afterall, and I have to spend an unknowable amount of time in the apartment we hate because we are lucky to have it at the current rent (for however much longer that lasts until we have to move again).
That is what will make people see the economy in negative terms, because the economy isn't for my benefit at this point. I know Trump won't fix anything and would likely make it worse, these issues are systemic and are probably beyond anyone to fix even if they cared to.
@@wastag9412i said it and ill say if again the so called trump trade war was nothing but phony talk. Meanwhile Biden does it for REAL. Why do you think european countries are angry at Bidens inflation act??
It's like the GDP has basically become disconnected from the lives of actual people
actually yes.. if the inequality rate also increased .. then your GDP growth will be disconnect, as most of the growth probably fall only to a certain % of the individual
American GDP is 70% consumer spending. Its almost impossible for that to be disconnected from regular people.
No, it’s just pure disinformation being spread by the political opposition.
"Fantoomgroei" is a nice book about it. It talks about how the definition of GDP changed in the 70s, when financial institutions and their profits started counting towards GDP. Before that, only material goods and services (lumber production, healthcare, House building etc) counted towards real GDP. Since financial institutions and their profit margins started counting towards GDP, their respective slice of the economic pie has steadily been growing, and people's material prosperity has been steadily decreasing.
The impact is: when I pay an overdraft fee to the bank it is reflected in GDP because the bank has provided a financial service. Gotta feel good about that. Financial services are parasitic. They are effectively a tax on the productive economy, yet they are counted as GDP. And financial services have gone from 8% of US GDP to 21%. It's like a guy robs you and what he steals increases GDP. @@faijro9260
I don't think the graphs fully include the pressure of interest rates and price increases in specific sectors. Home prices skyrocketed during the pandemic and then interest rates went up significantly. Not too long ago, about 80% of Americans could afford the average home, now its just about 30%. This does not include the fact that the main things people buy and rely on, like food, gasoline, and rent, have skyrocketed while inflation in other things that were in the CPI, like electronics, went down in value. There are also lots of layoffs in high paying industries like tech while retail is seeing a rise in demand.
Yea its so misleading how they mix inflation up with other industries that have small or no infation....Where it matters most, housing, food and energy, those industries are seeing huge price increases, sometimes even double...SO I dont care what people say, it's a terrible economy.
CPI doesn‘t include food and energy. Goodness knows nobody needs either of them. /s
They say food and energy are “too volatile” to include, and maybe that’s true depending on what you’re looking at, but if you need to buy any of that stuff, core inflation is basically ignoring reality for those getting squeezed to eat, drive, and stay warm.
I hope you know that home prices is a greed and capitalism problem. The only way to stop this is by having more regulation on the housing market or handling parts of it yourself just like Austria does. Trump would do the opposite of regulating the market more and would worsen the problem that the liberalist economist created
When you say “not too long ago, about 80% of Americans could afford the average home…“ How long ago was this? It certainly wasn’t during the Trump years. I’ve heard tell that a lot of what is going on with housing is not really a result of inflation but the rampant price gouging. Incidentally price gouging was huge during trumps tenure and I could easily make the argument that Biden was sabotaged by the centrists who sold out to the Republicans.
Why people are negative: car prices, house prices and interest, food prices
This video is out of touch.
@@Connect200the title is hilarious. ‘Booming’ my ass. What a joke
@@PastPerspectives11lol why would anyone pay attention to empirical evidence. I base everything on my feelings 😤.
@@SMA1394I base everything on the rent I'm paying now compared to before. 🙄
@@Connect200 This video is propaganda, telling you that everything is fine while the house burns down around you.
Do note that the negativity bias does not only relate to people choosing for negative news rather than positive news when given the choice, but also that when people hear both positive and negative news, they are more affected by the negative news than positive news.
In this case, I know the negative news, because I am the news. Because my mother tell me of her negative news. Because my neighbors, colleagues, friends and acquaintances all how bad news to tell. The only positive news are in the media and the data. The negative news are confirmed by personal experiences. I think the more accurate problem is the methodology to gauge this data had been faulty, and haven't yet up to date.
Oddly enough it helps to go bad news first, good news second, because we are more attached to the 'ending'.
Which in turn is a manifestation of what is known as loss aversion.
There’s a huge difference between ‘positivism’ and down-to-earth realism. GDP doesn’t tell much unless it’s broken down in reverse - where/for who(m) is growth happening, is it in the real or nominal part, how are ‘losses’ accounted for? Besides, the federal & national macroeconomic forces should include monetary moves such as QE (where, who, how long, how much).
All this *before* political squabbles, just observable facts first. Then - possible policy solutions…?
No that’s dumb. Partisans always have bias, there is nothing special happening now
Yeah, blue state NIMBY's are the main reason people are leaving blue states for red ones. But maybe that's bad for Republicans politically as these people move to red states and turn them purple
And yet, blue states generally have the highest rates of poverty, poor education, crime and bad health outcomes. Maybe it's a good thing for those states if a few people with resources move to their states and contribute.
Not everything is Blue/Red. Sometimes it's just crap because the US won't implement the better option because they're so star-spangled "exceptional"...
Grow up.
I'm not convinced of that. A lot of Republicans fear the same thing, but the idea that all Californians, for example, are vote D just isn't true. There's a lot of R there too, and those are the ones most likely to leave for Florida or Texas. I think what's going on is less a purpling of the US and more of a deeper polarization as the R and D have decided that the policies of the other are intolerable and joining their like-minded tribes. You can see this in how Texas and Florida are becoming more Republican, not less.
Why would a person be so upset about the outcome of policies they voted for, that they move to a new state BUT still vote for those same policies that made them leave the other state?!?
Americans don’t make a lot of sense….😵💫
@@ChuckThree Well Democrats are dumb like that. I mean they even used to think slavery is a good idea.
NIMBYism isn't just a blue thing.
DeSantis and Abbot can easily cut off suburbs from all subsidies and outlaw single family zoning, if they wanted to, but have yet to do so.
It'd a nice rule if people remember that GDP is not all economy.
If the US economy was trading like a company, its debt alone would freak out any reasonable investor. Its sales wouldn't even matter.
Amen!
true but its undeniable that any European country would kill to have those growth rates
@@sjg9887
That's how America rolls, kill to have these numbers.
The thing is, politicians have the incentive to promote GDP as the big number showing they’re doing a good job. That’s compared to the reality of prices rising and jobs not catching up.
I've seen data which breaks down real wage changes by percentile cohorts. While medium income earners saw their incomes stagnate, high earners' wages went down and low earner's wages actually went up. Those most benefitting from the booming economy may therefore simply be younger/busier/less politically engaged than your medium voter or survey taker.
The other major factor, which you only sort of touch on here, is housing prices. While individuals' personal finances may be doing fine, the dream of homeownership has vanished entirely for many. I believe this alone could be enough to crush economic sentiment.
Individual personal finances also relying on the government handouts that both Trump and Biden enacted during Covid. Which will run out soon.
My income may have went up, but basic expenses went up more.
@@gmarefan my favorite part about the inflation hitting the western world right now is how my government thinks im not working class anymore lmfao.. ill never own a home but im middle class to them.. hell i cant even afford a car if mine breaks down
I was thinking this was left out as a factor. The middle seems to have completely stagnated. I am actually surprised to see the high income earners doing worse, but the middle seems to have certainly taken a hit. To be honest the best thing that middle income workers can do is probably take a new job. Unfortunately companies are not motivated to pay anyone more until they find an empty seat to fill.
That’s a bad thing. Medium and high income earners were the only ones able to buy homes and live good lives pre pandemic . Now poor people earn “good money” but it doesn’t buy anything. $20 an hour was enough to buy a home in 2019. Now it’s not enough to rent a studio apartment. Yes a cashier may earn 20$ an hour instead of 11$ an hour now but they can’t do shit with that. And now the 60k income earner can’t buy a home either. Nor can the 120k income earner. Everyone is screwed under Biden
It's easy. "The economy is booming" just means GDP line go up. But when the majority of the "line go up" is fueled by things like massive government investment in companies via mechanisms like the inflation reduction act (lol name), none of that GDP growth actually touches your average citizen. It's purely fueling companies and stock market numbers, while your average person is left to grapple with things like inflated grocery and home prices.
More than ever there is a separation between 'the economy' as economists see it, and The Economy, as normal people experience it.
investments in companies is helping with the job numbers, especially since they used subsidies instead of tax cuts
@@grimaffiliations3671tell that to people seeing prices starting to creep up again. No, the economy is not all they say it is.
@@grimaffiliations3671 the only jobs people are getting is part time without benefits. New full time jobs have been declining
@@jonahhekmatyar Nonsense. Part time jobs are below where they were pre pandemic
@@iamnotamushroom2880 prices creep up for all sorts of reason, not sure how that's relevant to my point
The whole discussion made me think of Goodhart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure."
Policies are made to affect the metrics that will make it look like the economy is doing well. People don't pay attention to those metrics and they go off of how their spending is effected, their savings and how secure they feel at work. It's an experience i am sure many people have had where a doctor tells you, that you are fine but you don't feel fine.
Exactly. I was thinking just about this!
well then if you have a problem, like inequality, then you can make inequality measures the new target, and inequality may get better with time. Or maybe the inequality measures does get better but then some other aspect of inequality worsen, or something like poverty, as if everyone is poor inequality will be lower. Got me thinking about if there is a solution to Goodhart´s Law, because one need observable benchmarks to work around
I think this is a bad take. GDP, unemployment rate, ... have consistently and historically been good measures on the overall health of the economy, and even though it is not perfect like everything else, they have generally been among our best measures. Also, because they are not perfect, we use them in conjunction to paint a better picture with multiple POV. If a doctor tells me I am fine, and you don't feel fine, you are welcome to get a second opinion, but if the second and third doctor also tells you are fine, then maybe you just have a vibe of not feeling fine.
@bachpham6862 gdp becomes an increasingly less reliable indicator as inequality grows, especially now that 1% of the population may now own 60% of the entire wealth in the US.
Unemployment is also an unreliable indicator as it, according to my understanding, only counts those who are drawing upon unemployment benefits, and discontinues those who've reached their time limit in the system, and can no longer draw upon those same benefits, therefore no longer counted. Plus, like inflation, it is usually touted as a rate, and doesn't take account the accumulated charge or disruption.
One becomes increasingly skewed towards the rich, the other doesn't account for accumulated disruption.
@@grasshopper8901 yes, and focusing on gdp creates concerns about environmental issues for example, with finite resources on earth, we cant just keep growing forever, more than growing redistribution seems to be more important for the already developed countries. Focusing on growth is the underlying cause for programmed obsolescence for instance, which is bad for the quality of the products been produced
Housing/rent, healthcare and higher education are through the roof, not to mention food prices. If your housing cost goes up 30% then stops going up is everything ok now? No, you've got to contend with that increase forever. If the price of a house goes up 20% do you pay 20% more? No, a lot more than that because interest rates have gone up too and over 30 years most of what you pay is interest. More jobs huh? Employment includes part-time. These are not real jobs with benefits and a future, and that's where most of the gains have come from. What the hell do I care what the government statistics say--or the media for that matter. I live in the real world.
Once your wages go up, the problem goes away. Whether the bills are $10 out of $100 income, or $20 out of $200 won't matter. It ends up at the same proportion.
@@krissp8712 except wages have not kept up with inflation, housing prices and the interest rates.
More than that, the gap is the largest in decades.
@@krissp8712 That's called wage stagnation, which doesn't correlate to GDP growth.
Exactly. The Fed's proxy metric for an "overheating economy" is how many jobs were added, which includes shitty stuff like flipping burgers at McDonald's. How on Earth do people pay their bills with such "jobs"?
@@LoisoPondohva The video cites economic data to show real average wages have been on an increase trend and returned to pre pandemic.
The aggregate numbers on economic performance grossly underweight the costs that are actually felt by the middle class, with housing being the worst offender. Economists say that I can't possibly be worse off financially now than I was in 2019. Well I am, and by a huge margin, because I don't own a house. I make a little more money, but the mortgage on the houses I could've bought back then has doubled. I have been priced out of living anywhere near my job, and this has had a very real negative impact on my life. The same problem is impacting everyone in the US who doesn't already own a home. I say this as a staunch Democrat who will not be voting for Trump. After all, the zero percent interest rates and trillions in government spending that kicked off this inflation nightmare started under his administration. Inflation always lags money printing by at least 9-12 months.
Let's try Biden again ...should be plenty fun 🤡🤡🤡😂😂😂
@@borikero1 I sure as hell won't be trying Trump again. If he can run from a prison cell, that is.
lol @ voting democrat to reduce money printing
Trump's money printing is criticized by Republicans for being Democrat-lite. It would be funny that you want a full-blown Democrat who wants to print more money than Trump.
@@sanderwrong9106 historically speaking when we voting in a Republican to deal with inflation that gave us Ronald Reagan and the beginning of the end of the middle class and the massive exodus of manufacturing jobs to foreign Shores. Voting Republican will not work the way you think it will.
I'd love to see a video explaining how much of an economy can be influenced by a sitting president. Personally, I think we give these people way too much credit.
@@rrmackayEconomy is growing bigger to make debt manageable. Problem is, tax revenue is too small. Rich can hide behind tax shelters and tax loopholes.
@@rrmackay The Trump tax cuts massively increased debt, yet corporate profit went to stock buybacks instead of R&D or staffing increases. The money is there, but Congress refuses to cut debt.
@@richardarriaga6271 What a load of BS, congress has been spending like a ship full of drunken sailors for decades. The nation was already 20 trillion in debt when Trump came into office, Biden has increased the debt as much as it increased during Trump. Stop trying to pretend that its a partisan issue, its not, every congress spends too much. And US federal debt has nothing to do with corporate spending choices.
@rrmackay 2008 should have been wake up call to never vote for a Republican ever again. Tax cut and Deregulation don't work. Bush showed us, and that's why we had Obama for 8 years after the crash. All this inflation happened because of all the money that was given during Pandemic. Whether Biden or Trump was in office the inflation will still would have happened.
2008 should have been wake up call to never vote for a Republican ever again. Tax cut and Deregulation don't work. Bush showed us, and that's why we had Obama for 8 years after the crash. All this inflation happened because of all the money that was given during the pandemic. Whether Biden or Trump was in office, the inflation would still would have happened.
All I know is my household income was 58k a year with 2 jobs in 2018 (me and my wife.) And were fine. Now with 3 jobs at 110k, we did not move, stopped eating out 100%(2018 we used to all the time) havent had a vacation since 2021, and went from shopping at regular grocery to Aldis, and yet 110k is not enough anymore. Noting has changed since 2018. No bigger home. No bigger spending. Less spending actually in terms of real items and services. I have a budget tracker and can compare 12 mo period expenses. Groceries alone have gone up 6k in 12 momths. It now costs us more to eat at home than we used to spend eating out. We've gone from regular brand to store brand everything. We went from a new car, to a beat up subaru to cut out payments. At 58k, we were planninng and saving for a house. And were preapproved. We just needed the downpayment. Now at 110k, the bank says we can't afford a mortgage. Which is true. The lowest house would be a 3800 mortgage. And thats in the sticks. And my wife and I are working more than ever. From 70 hrs total between the two of us, to 100 hours between the 2 of us. And this is the state of everyone I know. I feel like the numbers don't really show that to achieve this "boom", the average American has had wages increase (sometimes) while their standard of living has decreased. Of course inflation is down. Because people cant afford it anymore. Economists seem to act like dropping inflation negates the inflation that already happened. My grocerys are still more than last year. The metrics are misleading. The bad stuff in the past, still effects us today. And all this is not taking into account the health insurance subsidies that are ending for lower income. Allot of people I know havent had to pay for insurance since the pandemic. That now kicks in this year.
If your groceries for two people has gone up $6k in a year without moving then you’re doing something horribly wrong. Hawaii has by far the highest grocery prices in this country and they average $7k a year per person. And a $3,800 mortgage even with bad credit and no down payment means, at lowest, the cheapest house you can find was $430k. That’s almost exactly the median house price in this country, but you can’t find a smaller house for cheaper? Depending where you live that could be right but I have my doubts.
Ok well I went from making about $55k in 2020 to making 6 figures today and I’ve never been better financially.
Absolutely right. My income went up and standard of living went down. And just because the rate of inflation goes down doesn't mean prices have normalized. The economic boom is coming at the expense of working people. And the media is willfully ignorant.
@UpstateAlgaeLaboratory Inflation is the worst thing for the working class, who are hurt by higher prices more than anyone. The rich can invest their money and benefit from inflation. That's why any policies that are inflationary (too much gov't spending, protectionism) are not good.
@@williamfrost9910 But I would like to remind you that Republicans will not fix that. Republicans have historically always been antiworker. During the Trump years you saw workers wages increased by pennies and then stagnate by the end of the second year in office and this was before the pandemic.
I just got off my 3rd shift work yay ima watch this and then pass tf out good video mate
@lolithighsmaybe three jobs or three consecutive shifts with a hour difference each?
The thing is US reported inflation numbers aren't reflecting what consumers feel on a day to say basis. Specifically they exclude food and fuel which have gone up in cost far more than the stuff that is counted in the CPI. As a data point, my food costs are about double what they were pre pandemic ( 4 years) which is vastly higher than the official inflation rate. Incomes aren't increasing at 20% levels, so of course it feels like your income went down every time you go to the store or eat out.
Especially in urban areas, food/housing/healthcare is double or more.
I've been out of work for over 3 months now. Not a lot of jobs compared to the number of people looking. All of them pay $40k to $50k less than I was making before.
That's the case for a lot of jobs posy pandemic. Supply chains are back normal, labour shortages reduced.
most job listings are fake
There's been a record breaking number of new jobs created under the Biden Administration. And the unemployment rate is shockingly low. Biden has also strengthened Unions more than any other President since Ike.
This really depends on the sector and region. Where I am, jobs are outnumbering workers. I work with people looking for new jobs and unless they are in tech, there are lots of options, especially in blue collar jobs.
Exact opposite problem here in central Europe (Northern Italy, Austria, Southern-Germany). We have businesses closing down due to lack of employees. If you want a job and secure living conditions, move here. We are literally importing immigrants in buses from other countries to work for us.
Not really accurate to look at states when you're looking at partisanship in USA. We're split between urban and rural.
Fact is its gotten way more expensive to live in cities because of housing. It kills any wage gains. I'd say thats why Democrats aren't so happy with the economy. The cost of everything in and around cities has gone up dramatically.
The value of the dollar in an urban center got cut in half from where it was 5 years ago.
Thanks for bringing this up! Not sure we this comment doesn't have more likes
@@DoctorCyan That's a gross exaggeration.
I live in a major city (Seattle). I moved to my current apartment in 2019. My rent (my biggest single expense) has gone up from $1900 to $2200, an increase of 15% in five years.
There’s an explosion of unmeasured economic activity post-pandemic. For example, accelerating trends of an ailing infrastructure combine to make forced commutes absolute hell…longer than they were pre-pandemic. That’s more fuel, car depreciation, and time.
Add millions of stories like that to inflationary measures that don’t fully capture true human costs (e.g., some inflation stats don’t include interest payments), or sometimes even educational costs and the numbers begin to look comical. In many ways, things are worse than they’ve ever been…two salaries needed to support one family turned into two salaries needed to support a DINK couple living in a studio apartment, waiting for home prices to crash.
Compare to a WWII veteran who went to college for free, and landed an AFFORDABLE starter home for his wife and 3 kids with a VA Loan…at the age of 26.
So yeah…we’re pissed. And it’s insulting to suggest things are better than they’ve ever been.
"Compare to a WWII veteran who went to college for free"
That guy also went to WWII for free.
Yep, and there's a class of people, myself included, who went to Iraq for free but the college...well...that costs a few bucks.@@greentoby26
@@greentoby26 you seriously think soldiers work for free? ... A more reasonable comment is "they also went to WWII". I would not trade the life I have now for one where I would have to go into a modern world war.
@@greentoby26 WWWII veteran is just an example. And the boomer generation mostly did not participate to any war, even less in the case of women... When that generation entered the workplace they were paid wages that were, on nominal terms, lower than those on offer today but allowed them to live much more princely lifestyles.
Blame the Republicans for their "trickle down economics", Trump's tax cuts for the rich, long expensive wars thanks to Bush Jnr and GOP removing regulations that favor corporations. All the gains in the stock market have now made the rich richer and the middle and lower classes poorer.
Debt, inability to save, insane housing cost, id argue those are the main reasons
I agree. Id go as far as to say it's not even inflation, it's outlook. There are more reasons now than ever for negative sentiment
I’m a young guy who works part time at a large home building supply yard while I go to college. Wages have gone up significantly since the Trump years at my job place, but how much does that matter to young people if none of these guys can even dream of affording homes? They’re blue collar guys in a red state so most of them drive gas-guzzling trucks because it’s honestly a huge part of the culture, so huge jumps in gas prices have a huge effect on them. Even with the older guys who don’t have to worry about buying homes saw their 401ks take huge beatings when Biden was elected and haven’t really recovered in many cases. There are dozens of factors that can’t be simply reduced to “It’s Biden’s fault” but I think it’s fair to say that when I think of the economy it feels worse under Biden than Trump.
@0rtu_Solis that's because we are in a much worse and much more dangerous position now than under trump. Nothings gotten a whole lot better and the debt and problems are still there. Oh Yay unemployment went down probably because everyone needs extra money to get by or more than they needed before. Let's not even get started with the foreign policy which has left us on the brink of WW3.
It’s the 5 trillion+ in government printing at the end of the day. Doing that right after COVID was an economic nightmare. We InCrEaSed gDP ThOuGh
@@0rtu_Solis People drive resource-intensive vehicles they don't need and then get mad at the President when the cost of fueling them globally rises?
The economy is booming for the rich and wealthy, not the working class. Wages are not increasing with the rising price of consumer goods, and housing is still as unaffordable as ever.
Well, no, blue collars workers saw huge increases never seen for years. Especially union workers. People in tech and office jobs were hit mostly.
It is for the working class. I'm a manager. The pay for high school graduate technicians used to $18/hr in 2020, it grew to $23/hr in 2023, that's a 27.8% wage growth in 3-4 years. This is across my industry.
Blue collar workers did not see increases. If you make 5% more money and everything costs 10% more, you LOST money.
@@PejmanMan most of the guys i know got 30% increases, having a good union is good for your personal business
housing hasn't always been unaffordable, that is a direct result of government policy
so, yes in fact the economy is improving under biden, but it is improving for the wrong "people". instead of improving for real people who really deserve all the riches in the world it is instead improving for those other "people" who did everything in their power to make the pandemic as bad as it could possibly, i blame the the automobile land hording parking lots.
My moms house is accruing more money each month in equity then I make … that’s ultra depressing to be honest. Like not every month but like going on Zillow and just checking is basically confirming I won’t own a home in the neighborhood I grew up in :(
My anecdotal beliefs as a middle class american living in a moderately sized city in a red state:
Americans more than ever recognize there is no "meritocracy" in our economic system.
Americans are concerned about the profits of their labor going to extraordinarily wealthy shareholders and executives, and being exposed to more and more regular waves of layoffs.
Americans are more likely to be exposed to and affected by sensationalist and anecdotal news stories, and are less connected to the views and opinions of their peers.
College educated Americans are spending more of their income on necessities such as rent and food, and the costs of luxury and recreational goods have spiked in cost making them proportionally much less accessible than they were before the pandemic.
Finally, Americans are much more susceptible to "US centric" beliefs, and are less willing to be (or being capable of) comparing the state of the US economy to that of other western nations or other global powers than citizens of other peer nations.
I appreciate the nuanced take this video has on the state of the economy as a whole versus the lived experiences of different segments of the US population.
American news has a big problem of using things that should be illegal in a fair playing field:
- Inviting the "idiot of the day" to display the opposing viewpoint as ridiculous because the person invited is just a nobody with no logical ability
- never "report" always "commentate". News sources often don't mainly say what's happening, they're mainly saying with a strong and confident tone what opinion they have about it.
- never properly graphically expressing complex topics of ethical, economic, or scientific nature: can come in many forms, such as inaccurate headlines or using % and total amounts in misleading ways, but can also just be an inadequate connection of a given topic to true good aspects..
Being an immigrant Asian American, I strongly disagree that there is no "meritocracy" in the US economic system. It's far more meritocratic than most countries. To be slightly politically incorrect, I want to say that it's Asian Americans in general thinks that the average Americans have been too rich for too long and is too entitled. Many Americans complaining and protesting, while we Asian Americans spend our time studying and work. As it's a meritocratic system, Asians quickly rose past even White Americans to become the wealthiest racial group in the US. That's how merit base system suppose to work.
@@xiphoid2011 You're talking about personal experience and anecdote here. Data says otherwise: that it's harder than ever to achieve social mobility through education and work in the US, and that it's easier than ever for those who simply inherit (Trump made that even worse by raising the threshold for tax-free inheritance) or rely on their parents' connections. It's a complete reversal of the social contract expressed in the American dream: which is that anybody who works hard and succeeds academically/professionally can aspire to a better life, regardless of their parents' background.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgiaNobody gets rich immediately unless they get lucky. Families get richer through generational wealth as they accumulate wealth to pass onto their kids over multiple generations.
Falling birth rates with the population growth primarily coming from immigration probably exacerbates that, as people don’t build generational wealth but just keep importing poor immigrants who’ll work for peanuts constantly.
I can't help but see the pointlessness of saying we are US centric. I have been very aware if Europe and other economy's struggling for a while. Honestly wish other Americans realized that too.
I genuinely think nearly all developed nations are going through huge declines atm be it the economy or society.
However just because Americans are way too focused at home dosent mean this country isn't in the gutter. Everywhere you look be it online or real life interactions everyone thinks the US economy and the country as a whole is in decline and getting worst by nearly every metric in the eyes of all people for various reasons. Nothing is getting better. The economy, society, infrastructure, quality of life, etc is collapsing for many Americans.
Great breakdown. I would add:
First, economists in the US overemphasize core inflation, which ignores food and gas price fluxations, while for ordinary Americans, those price increases are the most important. Economists here are belatedly realizing that rising food prices lead to the expectation of higher inflation in the future, allowing sellers to raise their prices more than they could otherwise get away with.
Second, Biden has failed to accomplish most of his core economic measures, from student debt forgiveness to a higher minimum wage to long term aid for families with children, due to Republicans in Congress and the Supreme Court blocking these. This leaves Democratic voters in a "he's a nice guy, but he didn't deliver" situation, depressing Democratic enthusiasm about the economy. Lack of confidence in Biden economically comes from both those who oppose his proposals, and those who support them and are disappointed they were not enacted.
Biden is also the one who pushed hard for the sanctions on Russia, gave Bibi a green card to do whatever, and so on ... so no, from an economic pov, he has been a disaster, it's just that ppl are digging into their savings, for a while .... while the federal gov is doing the same (by borrowing).
Of those to two factors I think food inflation is way more important. Not only do I spend more on food, but it is easier to drive less than it is to eat less. So given pressure, I eat food that is less prestigious and desirable. But that sort of substitution lessens the "inflation" of the food that I'd rather be eating. And lessens the value of making that substitution, as vegetables and grains become more expensive. In the past, I never ate hamburger - now I eat ground pork because it is significantly cheaper than hamburger. I'm getting more of an appreciation for Indian Cuisine. Hmm. I wonder why?
Did the Democrats have control on both House and Senate before the mid term election?
he could have addressed many of those things but didn't before the midterm elections
He also sided with the train companies over the train employees in the name of "the economy" - after talking about how pro union he was
From my viewpoint, the economy sucks right now. Got laid off 3 months ago, credit cards maxed out, will have to sell our house next month if I can't find work.
Thankfully, my resume is getting a few bites from employers, but there's a lot of competition in the job market.
There are people far worse off than me, who haven't found work for 6 months or more. It's not good.
Any update? You better be asleep for work in the morning!
@Lateralus665 Yes, I finally got a job offer a few weeks ago, start working on Monday. Talk about a Thank you, Jesus! moment. 😂
Is it an ideal job? No - but close enough. A one year contract through a recruiting agency.
I think economics has a measurement problem when it comes to GDP.
What you're measuring there is the level of monetization in the economy.
Over time, and between economies, GDP does tend to correlate well with other forms of productivity.
That does not imply that more GDP means a "better' economy in each and every occasion.
(Unless you intend to represent solely the interests of financial institutions which have a much more direct relationship with GDP.)
If a corporation judges its economic conditions by profit, so too do individuals.
When you're judging the economy by survey, I think that data's going to correlate better with personal savings rate than GDP.
This is at a long term low. I'd look at the costs of healthcare, education/training, housing, food, debt servicing as potential culprits.
No one gets anywhere savings wise in a GDP optimized economy. It's borrow and spend.
I think a more nuanced multi perspective analysis is required to see the problem with a booming economy for bankers.
reminds me of thar "wasted gdp" paper
Real GDP per capita accounts for these. You only need to check if they added the the costs you mentioned to the consumer basket that they used for calculating the inflation and that they are in the proportions you'd agree with.
True but as he mentioned the respondents in the survey also mentioned they felt we they were doing good even though their sentiment on the economy was overall negative.
@@prolarka science is a continuous debate, not a metric.
Be honest about advocating for a zero savings zero social mobility economy when you've maxed out debt after targeting gdp for multiple generations
The problem isn't inflation adjustment, it's the wrong target entirely. Gdp is precise and inaccurate, precision is insufficient here.
I think the term you are looking for is "disposable income"
I'd say you definitely needed more attention on the realities of our trash housing market to really capture the despair. It doesn't really matter if your wages saw a marginal increase relative to inflation if your rent just went up 50%. The average American can't even _imagine_ saving up enough to get out of the renters trap, which is pretty much by definition squeezing as much as you can afford out of you regardless of how much you make.
My rent literally doubled the day my 1 year lease came up for renewal in Jan 2021, a 2 bedroom apartment went from $1300 to $2850 in a month. Had to move 50miles away to find rent I can afford in an old ugly apartment in a terrible part of town with an awful commute and I freaking hate it. All so I can save for a house I'll never be able to afford when the prices go up beyond what I can pay, again (houses were high 200s are now going for 600+). I work full time white collar work and part time at nights, so all these virtuous rich people saying we all don't work hard and don't deserve it can stuff it.
You forgot to mention that while employment is up, full time employment is down.
The biggest pressures not mentioned are the substantial increases in rents and mortgages causing cities to be nearly unlivable for the average wage worker, the rise in interest rates increasing said mortgages as well as car prices, which have also risen significantly even for used models. Combine this with the price of goods such as food and commodities, and the situation is more apparent. For the well off its no problem, taking the averages it seems great but wealth inequality is at an all time high, while the rich have gotten richer with corporations raking in record profits, the average wages for the former middle class have not increased nearly enough to catch up with these substantially increased costs of living.
For me, it feels like my middle class community in Mesa, AZ gauges the economy based on purchasing power determined by inflation we see at restaurants, grocery stores, and gas stations and how much their wages increased. If their overall purchasing power decreased, even with a booming economy, it feels like the economy is suffering, because that's the most important relevant economic factor to them personally.
Idk about anybody here but according to many of my relatives it doesn't feel like they're being misinformed by the media. Everything's more expensive & their wages have barely budged
It depends on what your relatives do for a living. And if they are in a union.
I think a major part of the disconnect is that economists use poor, obsolete metrics. Things like the standard unemployment rate, despite the economy having changed by changes in labor participation rates, the rise of gig jobs, and much more time being spent in tertiary education. Why is the analysis based on average real wages of those employed, instead of median wage of all those folks who could be working? It seems like income based on government largess is less valuable that income based on a good job, because it can disappear by arbitrary government policy changes. Also, folks can factor in global political situation into their evaluations on how the economy is doing.
Goodhart's Law.
@@AaronMichaelLong That is definitely a factor, especially with regards to inflation indices.
@@richdobbs6595 Inflation, labor participation, interest rates, CPI, the stock market, all of these indicies are trying to apply simple numbers to an immeasurably complex economic picture.
@@AaronMichaelLong True, but what is your point? Are you agreeing or disagreeing? Is this the best set of indices, or just relics? The universe is immeasurably complex, but engineers evolve to better designs over time. At least in theory, doctors use better medicine and diagnostics over time. Has there been an equivalent improvement or breakthrough in econometrics?
@@richdobbs6595 Economics is not engineering. Neither is politics. These... pursuits do not yield unambiguous empirical data the way disciplines underpinned by chemistry and physics do.
It is my position that these measures are just as flawed as the rest of the economic craft, which is a discipline thronged with ideologues and motivated reasoning.
When you analyze the economy from the perspective of a rational participant, you come to starkly different results from those displayed in the real world, because people *aren't* rational.
The implication of Goodhart's Law is that there is *NO* actionable measure, because the act of implementing a policy which hinges on it distorts the utility of the measure, and corrodes the intended effect of the policy.
I first came to Goodhart's law in technology, where my earliest jobs were in call-centers. The operators were measured by the number of calls taken per hour, this motivated them to come up with whatever pretext to terminate the call as swiftly as possible. You know, "Restart your router, then call us back." The result was that the actual objective, providing customer service, went to the wall for the sake of the metric.
You see this all the time in business. An executive or manager comes up with a set of metrics, the staffers come up with ways to game the metric, and the actual objective the metric was trying to achieve suffers. Why should monetary or government policy be any different?
Always love it when a new M&M video pops up. Great video again Joeri
We all get the news every time we buy groceries.
Yep. I'm glad that they managed to keep inflation way down compared to the rest of the world. Sadly, i don't think a lot of people have that perspective.
This is the best econ channel on youtube, i wish there were more channels like this.
There are other channels, he sometimes makes good videos, this one is not expansive enough
I with? Are you Mike Tyson? 😂😂
Wish* LOL@@yashashsgowda6662
@@ThnkIaA could you reccomend few? it would be nice to watch more than just this one
More assholes sucking up to the people in power or applauding authoritarian dystopian measures like CBDCs?
I work for minimum wage. This a wage that is not liveable despite it being given to an extremely generous portion of the population. I am disabled and cannot find a "better" job than customer service. I am lucky to have a room cheap enough to rent. I could easily be one of the many, many homeless people dying on the streets. No aid, no mercy. So no, I am not feeling this "great" economy, by design. I can barely afford groceries as it is. Forget emergencies or retirement.
On a purely cynical point of view, having to deal with a economic crisis like 2008 and 2020 is much better than having to deal with high inflation. An economic crises only affects people losing their job, and on a plus side governments have to undertake extreme measures that are going to be remembered for decades with little to no opposition. On the other hand, high inflation affects everybody, poor middle class, rich, super rich, nobody likes going to the grocery stir and seeing price raising. And the point is that, even if you receive a raise to keep up with inflation, you’re going to think that the raise was your merit, while you’re not going to think that you’re part of the inflation problem.
It’s like being on a traffic jam: you don’t think you’re part of the traffic.
Good take! Except…if you’re the person losing their job, or their house, and possibly their home equity. 🫤 Part of the problem is that people are using the wrong terms. Just saying the economy is not specific, rather people should reference the interest rate or the unemployment rate or the consumer price index. The latter, the CPI did spike this past year or so, and that’s what people are feeling. Yet unemployment is historically low, and the stock market and GDP are trucking along. Personally, I’d rather be challenged with temporarily high prices than lose my job, then you’re SOL and nothing is manageable! 🫤💩
I guess you don't know what you are talking about
Wage rises had little effect on this cycle of inflation from almost all studies.
I think people that got financial breathing room for the first time in years during the pandemic (student loan pause, rent assistance, unemployment, child tax credit, etc) and then going back to their pre-pandemic working conditions plus effects of inflation is the pain people feel. Many people went from living with dignity back to toiling and now recognize their old life for what it was - unacceptable exploitation.
Edit: and now that people are reacclimated to their lifestyle it's going back up.
this election makes me wish there was a "none of the above" box i could click
Nevada has that option right?
@@herisuryadi6885 but for national elections?
Maine actually has ranked ballots, they did it via their state legislature, you can support candiates that are taking such initiatives
sadly there's no such box, even those who don't vote influence the election
You could always vote for 3rd party but hey, I wouldn't expect the average American citizen to have the intelligence to do that.
I can tell you from my own family's experience, it's the higher interest rates that are causing all the pain on both the home ownership front as well as the cost of running a business.
sad part is higher rates weren't even necesarry. Most of the inflation was supply driven and sorted itself out as supply bottlenecks unwound. We couldn've seen the same level of inflation with much lower rates like Japan
Rates might be higher, but from a historic perspective, they’re not high. They’re rather in line with normal historic rates (not too high, not too low).
It’s just that they were kept so low (near 0) for so long post-Great Recession that people came to expect near 0 rates.
Mortgage rates fell massively for 32 years. That entire drop was a one time event. The "era" of cheap capital for homes is over. If you got to participate in that ponzi scheme you're sitting pretty, if not, normal economics is going to feel pretty painful.
@@SamuelClemens-o6q if they got to participate and had the foresight of opting for a fixed rate mortgage, if they thought taking a variable rate mortgage was worth the point or so lower, then they’re in trouble.
1.) GDP is a poor measure of economic growth. GDP includes $3T of federal government deficit spending in the years 2022 and 2023 which is really a liability not an asset.
2.) My insurance costs went up 25%. My food costs went up 20%. My housing costs went up 10%. I need these three items to survive. My income went up zero percent. I am working more and earning less due to working off of the clock.
3.) The better measure of the economy is GDI - Gross Domestic Income, not GDP - Gross Domestic Product.
4.) The M2 money supply has plunged.
Anecdotally I go to McDonald’s and I see an order of hash browns go up to $3 when it used to be close to $1. I need to see a chart about that.
The problem is that people just accept that price increases are inflation and pay it. But prices are set by the market, not costs. If prices go up too high, you’re supposed to buy something else until the price goes back down.
If McDonalds can make more profits by selling hash browns for $3, they should. This isn’t inflation, it’s the basis for free-market economics.
@@DoctorBiobrain Yeah, we're told their costs are going up, but a lot of companies have record profits, which means they're charging more to charge more.
McDonalds just reported a loss in q4. Part of the reason is that they lost the "Value" clients because of the price hikes. They miscalculated the pricing of their products.@@DoctorBiobrain
The potato crops had some issues in 2023 due to rare weather events but 2024 should be better. Remember the issue with Eggs last year? It happens from time to time with agriculture
@@DoctorBiobrain
Except in America, your daily necessities are made by 1 of 2 players who hold 90% of the market. For food, almost all the supply of a food (say, chicken) is in the hands of maybe 4 or 5 conglomerates.
McDs isn't lying to you, they're really jist passing on costs. It's just that America doesn't have markets, it has cartels for virtually everything because the US government wants corps big enough to run their neoliberal BS in small countries.
I'm Irish, so this might effect how I view things, but I was reading a piece about how the Irish economy was doing great because unemployment is low and real wages are rising. And what I think is happening is that a lot of the dissatisfaction with the economy is to do with infrastructure and service provision. Like it doesn't matter if you've a good job and lots of money if you're stuck in traffic because cars are clogging up the bus system and there's no trains. Infrastructure and service provision don't get measured in many of these statistics so it goes unnoticed but I think it might be at the root of the problem.
Food and gas are extremely expensive . So is medical cost
The reason people complain about Gas is because they buy fucking SUV/Trucks, which are going to have poor mileage and then complain about prices as they have to refill more. Medical cost is up to congress to pass something but Republicans don't want to change it and Dems don't have enough support for a public option.
Especially when it’s forced by you by socialist state that gives it to non-residence for free
Nice look at a deeper dive! I’m wonder why one would be optimistic about a lowering inflation rate at this point though? The prices aren’t going back down, and our wages won’t be going up. How is that not going to mean permanently putting people into a harder time than they used to be in?
This entire comment section just basically say "I don't trust the number"
But economics is precisely the combination of psychology, sentiment and numbers. Not just figures. That is econometrics.
economists need to touch grass occasionally lest they forget what actually affects people’s lives
Imagine that, trusting your actual life than abstract numbers that only effect the top 1% anyways
Doesn't help that economists tend to have a lower IQ than most academic disciplines...them the "number(s)"
After 2020, many Americans went nuts and decided crime is acceptable. The crime rate in Democratic cities has skyrocketed and many things that before were considered crimes have been decriminalized. The consequence is that wealthy people have fled these cities in mass and have gone to the cities in the red states leading to a housing cost shock in these cities. Californians and New Yorkers complain about the increase in crime (which leads to higher costs of living) while Floridians and Texans complain about the sudden increase in the price of housing. These are the most populous states in the union by a big margin so I am singling them out.
See what you are not looking at is inflation is a slope or rate of change, not a value. So when cash liquidity went up and businesses increased prices in response, wages did not keep up with the increased prices.
With cumulative inflation from 2021 to 2024 at 15.76% in the US helps understand the negative sentiment
That is a mega/super-duper official statistic...real inflation is closer to 40%. The trifecta that makes up most of the budget in a household (housing, transport, and food) are up 25% to 40% in most places. They are learning to do propaganda with statistics.
@@borikero1 40%? what are you smoking. Our bills might have gone up closer to 15%
@@jeremytine rents, food, house prices are all up about 40% ...car price inflation is in the upper 20s%... Insurance is up about 100% in many places...wages are up about 15% to 20%. So you did get that last part right. The only people that think inflation is anywhere near the "official numbers" are people living in very high cost of living places that have stagnated because of how expensive they were to begin with.
@@borikero1 citation needed, not the numbers I see when i looked it up. Also, you said "inflation" not cherry picked and lying stats. Cars for instance starting going high with covid due to chip shortages and had little to do with Biden. Covid absolutely caused a global inflation. USA is actually doing well comparatively.
For instance,"rent" according to bureau of labor statistics, since covid rent has gone up 5.22% on avg per year. the previous 4 years(Trump) was 3.56%, so a net difference of a 1.66%/year. And what was the avg rent inflation under Obama/Biden for 8 years?2.52%
EDIT: insurance up 100%? yeah BS. Auto insurance on avg rose 31% 2013-2023 or 3.1%/year also from according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Thanks once again for a great video! One thing that you might want to look at are the average savings and debt levels. People are digging into their savings and going into debt to continue their lifestyle, pushing the growth of a primarily consumption driven market. I wonder if that might have consequences down the line, if people don't get back to earning sustainably soon.
I haven’t finished the video but my guess is going to be that average debt has significantly increased which explains why people don’t feel like they are getting ahead, they are just getting back to where they should have been.
"vibecession" is ridiculous. Most people have experienced massive, real downturns and inability to get ahead.
I think one important thing to note is that yes, the rate at which inflation is increasing has slowed. But the damage has already been done and crawling wage growth just has even more to catch up on now. Cost of living is just strangling everyone, look at credit utilization rates
They never mention the fact that 5 Americans own half the country's wealth. I'm no mathematician, but...
I think it's worth noting on the media side that there is kind of an asymmetry in partisan media in the US. Major conservative media is more willing to stump for Trump through thick and thin, while major liberal media tends to not want to appear as partisan and therefore isn't going to run puff piece stories about Biden doing a great job on the economy. So liberal media sort of tends to report negatively for both, while conservative media will have Trump's back while he's in power, which affects perceptions.
You really are living in your own bubble if you believe that. If you start looking at what people of other policial persuations think, they are very convinced that liberal US media is extremely one-sided and non-liberal media is much more nuanced. The truth is that your brain has a bias to find whomever you agree with to be reasonable and nuanced and whomever you disagree with to be partisan and singleminded. As someone not even from the US I find that reading liberal US media has felt like reading pure political propaganda since Trump was elected.
I will say that liberal US media seems more critical of Biden in particular than non-liberal media has been with Trump, so since 2021 it's been somewhat bettered.
I don't know, I've also seen liberal media cover for Biden and conservative media criticize Trump. I've found both sides seem to complain that "their side" is fractured while the "other side" is united.
I think this is due to the natural bias that comes with knowing the nuances of your own "side" better.
Republicans generally don't know or care about the differences between Intersectional Feminists, Environmentalists, and Moderate Liberals. Likewise Democrats generally don't know or care about the differences between Christian Nationalists, Libertarians, and Neocons.
So each group ends up viewing the other as a threatening monolith.
Inflation seems to be a lot higher than what is reported by the government so there is a perception that wages have not caught up yet for most people. Also, it doesn't help that mortgage interest rates are higher than they have been in over a generation despite sticky home prices not dropping to compensate - this locks a lot of people out of the housing market regardless of whether wages have actually kept up with the fake inflation stats.
Because government measures the rate of inflation increase. Since it's already been high, the effect of the high has already diminished the value of the currency
Well I don't know about everyone but to me wage just slightly go up but price of everything go up a lot more.
It doesn’t matter how good the numbers look, layoffs are wide spread, wages are down compared to massively inflated prices and that makes it impossible to save or even buy anything.
I’d argue that because of the mass layoffs in tech, tech workers have a negative view toward the economy, and those who are involved in tech have more influence on the internet, thus swaying the general sentiment of the economy
@@wchristian2000 Polls show across the board that people have this negative view, including in blue collar jobs.
@@atomicfly777 I am in agreement with you
I've always thought unemployment figures from USA are a bit.. off, with good reason. In Europe and many other parts of the world, if you can't work for whatever reason you are supported by the state, in the USA you are barely supported by the state for a very limited amount of time so you'll end up homeless and homeless people don't count towards unemployment stats...
Unemployment data doesn’t include people that are no longer looking for work
That is wrong. Unemployment figures from any country (not just the US) generally dont include people who dont search for a job. Youre mixing it up with the labor force participation rate.
Please educate yourself.
it also doesn’t include people with fragile part-time jobs that could disappear at any moment. sociologists these days use “underemployment” as a better measure, but i see economists are still behind
@@kwtr1609 Unemployment rate excludes discouraged workers ie those who haven’t searched for a job in the last 4 weeks.
@@chesspiece4257underemployment is acknowledged by economists, but the fed has not caught up imo
It's like asking why are people fleeing from a burning building.
None of the above, it's the price of food and goods, the availability of goods too
It also doesn’t help that we are still coping with the after effects of inflation. My household income increased 50%, but it doesn’t feel like much when everything costs 10% more. So it’s also sticker shock. And a lot of the democratic voter base is in this position. Wages might be going up but we’re lucky if we’re doing better.
Same here. Got a promotion and a 30% raise two years ago, I have never had less money in my pockets, had never had to take money out of my savings so many months in a row. It is depressing. Had to buy a new fridge, they have gotten so expensive! We want to have a car, but it is unaffordable! Feels like I do everything I am supposed to do, work hard, get a good job, get promoted, and Im still at the same spot financially that I was 5 yeras ago.
10% more expensive!!?? Where??? Try like 40% more expensive overall.
Negativity bias comment was savage. Love your videos. Thank you!
Media is responsible for a big part of people's opinion. Every Conservative changed their opinion about the economy overnight when Biden was elected.
But economies don't change overnight!
I'm in my 50's and the last time that inflation was a problem I was around 10. No one under 60 in the United States experienced inflation as an adult. It's not just that it's bad it's also new
it isnt booming for my family.. we are pretty frugal ppl, we are managing but it is stressful... regular goods doubling in some cases.. when you go to pretty much any store you can hear people are in either same or worse shape, but they are talking about it out loud in the grocery store.. blaming it on the media is the lamest excuse ive ever heard, its gaslighting..
Kinda....right the problem is we dont have real good memories. Remember inflation grows at around 2% every year so inflation is relative view point. This is kinda shown in the fact that the study participants in large were happy about their pay and were some what optimistic even though they responded with negative sentiment. The vibesession is because while prices are higher, they will always be higher but people complain about it more. The mere fact that people attribute every rise in cost to a president and not to the store or merchant is a good example that we mostly just vibe when it comes to complex things like an economy.
@@bradleywhite6815 what we are experiencing is a change in the world order.. our entire monolithic western world order was predicated on cheap energy, cheap debt and the ability to project influence.. these are trending in the reverse as we are beginning to see. we could have enacted polices decades ago to reduce the impact of these changes but we didnt.. now we get to deal with consequences of a new reality that western world order assumed would never come to fruition.. to claim its just the media, or look at this graph its not that bad.. is gaslighting people.. the thing is people notice and they arent happy.
I think relative to the pandemic there is a good amount that is perception but i do think sentiment is more negative generally because of the fact there are many items which have overpriced now. You have the big three, wages not keeping up with inflation, houses more expensive, college more expensive.
There is evidence that poor economic sentiment is often followed by an actual economic decline. This has occurred several times in the last 50 years. I am uncertain why, but it could be that a poor economic normally hits people before the numbers reflect it. AS for MSM influence, this is only the case if there is a lack of alternative views in the media, which is not the case right now. It may have been when the MSM dominated the news, but this is not the case anymore.
AS for political polarization, this may be the case but as this this video shows this always occurs. I feel the theory in this video may well be accurate. I also suspect a lot of money is flowing from red to blue states, which is likely due to high crime as much as zoning restrictions. The zoning restrictions have always been an issue, so you need to identify what has changed in the last 8 years. Crime and poor economic management and an influx of illegal immigrants which saturate public services is the likely causes.
Regardless poor economic sentiment is often used as an early indicator of economic issues and whatever the reason is, of which I do not know, I suspect this is what I would focus on.
I'm surprised he states mainstream media as responsible for building the image of a bad economy. The likes of CNN for example are always blowing the trumpet of Biden and the Fed's successes.
The cost of housing in Florida is worse than any other state and the statistics on homless people in Florida are not collected to be accurate. Desantis has appointed cronys in every part of the state government. He broke Rick Scotts' record as governor for the number of people he appointed to state positions who had donated to his campaign or pac. If you look in the wooded areas around every town in Florida there are mass amounts of homeless encampments/people and due to Fl not offering social safety net programs these people are not accounted for in statistics used for calculating poverty or homelessness. Even without the state participating in good faith with the production of data, Florida has been identified as the state with the most regressive tax system inspite of how DeSantis controls the data experts have access to. In spite of this Florida has also been identified as the state with the worst wealth inequality and highest inflation. If you don't think DeSantis would play with data so it makes his governance(or lack thereof) look better... look at DeSantis's hand picked Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo who was caught red handed alterning the data to fit his conclusion for a study on the side effects of MRNA covid vaccines. Ladapo was not even reprimanded, where as in nearly any other state he would have been fired. DeSantis hired him for the sole purpose of helping to spread vaccine disinformation, which DeSantis used as part of his Presidential Campaign.
Please use time costs over inflation and wages. Or at least include them alongside.
They normalize out alot of weirdness into a more clear echinomic metric of the average work hours needed to buy something.
It also allows to clearly account for people in different economic brackets and how the prices of things affect them. Which is an insanely hard thing to get an estimate for using wages and "inflation".
Time costs are insanely powerful in how useful they are.
As an example the book "super abundance" has alot of uses of time costs. In that book it is used to compare present day with historical to see how things have changed from a "how easy are things to get" point of view. And it also has an explaination... its mostly a book of time cost data with a title based on what the data ended up showing.
Simple answer, the data is rigged. Once you break down the statistics the claims by the Biden admin don't hold water. For example the jobs numbers. Full-time employment has nose dived while part-time and government jobs skyrocketed to fill the gap. This commonly happens when entering a recession. Particularly bad when government exceeds 10% of new hires which is currently exceeding 25% in the last report.
A lot of indicators towards a recession have been raising alarm bells. People have been heavily drawing on credit. The stock market has seen extreme divergences that haven't corrected yet. The banking crisis is still ongoing and currently we are seeing the commercial real estate pop.
My own personal experience is my groceries have doubled since covid while my pay has barely moved about 14%. That and my hours got cut, so I actually make less than 5 years ago. 3 income houses are becoming a thing.
It’s most likely social inequality the economic stimulus, and the fed being the savior of the economy, for the past 20 or so years, has caused asset prices to substantially rise. Those without assets have seen their share of wealth decrease substantially relative to the top 1 % and most likely will continue. Not an easy fix to this issue.
The economy is great for corporations, not the working class
10:14 it’s incredible that political affiliation can have such a giant influence on the way people perceive the economy… it really is all just feelings
Not really at all. GDP isn’t really an accurate predictor of economic success anymore. In cities like New York condemned buildings are valued at over a million and even if you earn six figures you’ll barely be able to afford rent let alone fit in as “middle class.”
All this “so-called” growth isn’t really being felt among average consumer who had taken note of how prices have risen while rages have stagnated.
The impact of skyrocketing costs of a) a college education, and b) housing in America, cannot be overestimated. They are both now unaffordable for the working classes.
These have problems long before the pandemic. Housing supply crashed and never recovered from the great recession and higher education and medial costs have been terrible for decades.
No, we were upset because we lost purchase power, prices went up 20-23%, everything became more expensive and we felt it in the wallet.
Housing. The answer is Housing. It's really bloody obvious to anyone who is an actual person living in the USA.
A lot of this is about healthcare, housing, gas prices, and food. Healthcare and housing are long-standing complicated issues, but gas prices and food are sufficiently volatile enough that they may experience deflation in the short term. If oil prices drop, food will probably follow. But right now, a lot of that seems to be dependent on the situation in the Gulf of Aden. Even with housing, it is possible the market will experience a large price drop or crash given that there are considerably fewer buyers.
Alternatively, we can figure out ways to ensure reasonable access to necessities like healthcare, housing, food, and transportation without being at the mercy of the "market".
Viewing any problem through the arbitrary restriction of only red and blue filters removes so much of the visual spectrum humans would normally use to illuminate a topic of study. Also, can you point us at an affordable home...asking for a friend.
Prices have increased 20 percent, mortgage rates up 5%, rent up 25% in the past 4 years, so economic pain in terms of family budgets is also an important factor influencing swing state voters.
What inflation indicator does the real wage chart use? For most people it feels like real wages have decreased even more than that. If that chart does not include housing then it is really missleading.
Housing costs hasn't really gone up for people that already owned their house. The problem is for renters and people wanting to buy a house, but that isnt as many people.
@@Carewolf 36% of people in the US rent, plus a lot of people who own, bought recently, lets say 10% (dont have data on that) which means they bought at already quite high prices and probably have large mortgages in proportion to their incomes. Plus a proportion of people had to or will have to move and re-finance at high rates, lets say 5%. That is around half the country who is struggling with higher housing costs, in addition to higher cost of living. And it is mostly younger people who are already dissilutioned with Biden for other reasons.. Indicators really should include inflation in asset prices as well as consumer prices. It is misleading that many of them dont.
Thank you for having so many different languages subtitle to choose
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There's two housing markets. People who bought pre mid-pandemic who were able to buy their house for 70% (or less) of what it costs today and got a super low interest rate , and people who didn't. People who didn't, renters or those who were too young to buy, have gotten screwed. They'd need their pay to nearly double to have the same buying power they had 4 years ago. That's just in housing and doesn't factor in huge increases in food and vehicles.
All of these metrics depend on how you measure inflation. If you tweak the inflation formula to make the numbers look better than they are, there will obviously be a disconnect between public sentiment and the published data. For example, if my housing, food and energy cost rise substantially, it doesn't matter if consumer electronics or other goods fall in price because I wont have the disposable income to buy them. The weights in the CPI are incongruent with the actual public experience and I think public sentiment for economic wellbeing likely weighs necessary expenses like food, housing, and energy as the strongest factors.
Additionally, inflation rate as a whole is hard for people to understand because it is a derivative. If we assume wage inflation over the past 6 months has matched real inflation over that same time frame, people are not better off. They are just not worse off than at the start of the 6 months. If wage inflation lagged real inflation over the 6 months preceding, then people would still be worse off now than they were a year ago despite the improvement in wage inflation over the most recent 6 months. In order to get back to the quality of life from a year ago, we would need wage inflation to exceed real inflation which we have yet to see. People act like wage inflation keeping up with real inflation is some great gift and everyone should be more grateful for it when in reality it should be the bare minimum.
German here. We're not optimistic about our economy. It went downhill so fast and government is in gridlock because of right wing trolls being so powerful at the moment, that it's impossible to do something about it.
We knew those official statistics would turn to 💩 as soon as they decided to change the definition of a recession to avoid saying we were in one 🤡🤡😂😂. We are definitely in uncharted territory, we don't even know what territory we are in anymore.
The way inflation is measured is a poor indicator of prices. Hypothetically, if prices double (so a 100% increase) in 2022 and then remain elevated without changing (0% increase) in 2023, economists will say inflation is 0% when in reality it went up 100% in 2 years. This is why Americans are unhappy with the economy because the prices of almost everything have gone up significantly and now have stayed elevated.
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All I have to say is that big companies like the one I work for have dropped almost all their contractors in the past two years. This doesn't impact the companies' unemployment numbers, but it is a large number of people who can't find jobs or have to accept lower paying contracts now.
Excellernt explaination. I'm a Asian American immigrant in the booming state of Texas, so I'm politically centrist. I can see how pro-business Repblican policy is a big reason for Texas:'s success, but I also see some extremist Rublican ideas like abortion ban is just not right. But as almost everyone around me is working and making good money, I don't understand how some still claim the economy is bad while I'm handing them big annual raises and even bonuses. Your video explains a lot! Two thumbs up.
You’re working a nice white collar job. Nearly every other company, especially the big ones, haven’t given out bonuses to the average employee in years. The biggest are cutting staff to make themselves look good to shareholders.
"Extremist", AKA not killing babies as early as a few blue states, despite their laws being more in line with the rest of the world then abortion until birth laws.
You're describing how the Texas economy is doing great, not that of Ohio or Maine.
A final point missed is about the matter of expectation: The baseline expectation became the post pandemic new reality of wages that were nominally sometimes 20% higher and government UBI that crushed poverty and drastically reduced inequality. The only satisfying conclusion to the pandemic rebound would have been if those new realities had been made permanent, ie permanent ongoing UBI and a permanent labor "shortage" with "super" wages.
Yes please. More of that
Real Inflation is higher than the official rate. Resulting in your real wage graph to high.
People have to understand that GDP has no correlation to how well people are doing. I GDP is high no matter if wealth is hyper concentrated or more fairly distributed.
People are running out of their spending power! Credit card debt bubble, housing and student loans as well as medical debt all nearing all time highs! With all of that there’s inflation which has raised the prices of essential goods! That’s why people feel that there will be a stagnation in the economy in near future! Because people will only barely afford essential goods and demand will drop thus growth of companies will suffer as a result!
The complaints people have about the economy won't be improved under Trump. It's similar to Brexit in 2016, when people couldn't name a concrete improvement to their lives that leaving the EU would bring. It was an emotional decision, based on anger and destruction. The result has been carnage, far lower quality of life, and with the opposite effect the promised improvements (more immigration, worse trade agreements, loss of net wealth). Being angry at the Democrats and Biden is not the same as having concrete solutions to these issues.
Leaving EU is less regulation. I know how many useless laws were added in Poland because of EU laws. Laws for small business (which are pain in the a..) and for big businesses (which is driving cost of everything up). Most known are higher mandatory insurance/taxes for older cars, higher price of houses because of buying contracts for co2 emission for steel, concrete, electricity, more expensive food because of regulations for farmers (look at the last couple years of them protesting in Brussels for many different reasons). There is a lot of treat specific costs for doctors, pharmacist, building companies etc. To much to count.
So many comments saying something to the effect of "those economy numbers aren't relevant, real americans are stuggling to get by!". Did you not see the part where people are rating their own financial situation favourably? This is literally the crux of the mystery.
People always overvalue themselves both good and bad. People think they make above average mistakes, they think they are of above average intelligence, they think they lie more than other people, and they also think they are doing better economically than the average person. That statistic in and of itself is not really relevant.
Also, most of the economic boom is happening in Red States, so people there will most likely have a feeling of “we’re succeeding in spite of Biden, not because of”, hence why they think they’re doing well personally but think the overall economy is bad (which given the universal stuff like inflation for many years very much hits).
And hell, if Red States do better than Blue States, then that means Republican policies lead to more economic growth than Democrat policies. Why wouldn’t people want to vote in the working policy?