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| Economy |
| Who You Gonna Believe: Your Wallet or Your Lying Eyes? |
| 2023-12-04 |
| [American Greatness] In a romantic relationship, one cannot generally influence his partner’s emotions with rational argument. Feelings are unmediated, unruly, and mostly instinctual things. The same may be said for our feelings about the economy. They are not always rational, but that is not to say they are false or meaningless. Joe Biden and his surrogates keep trying to convince and shame the American people into believing that the economy is doing great and that "Bidenomics" is the reason. Nice try. The people are unhappy and not buying it. While this is an emotional reaction, it also has a basis in real facts about the state of the economy, which are refracted through individuals’ personal circumstances. The first and most glaring issue is that everything is more expensive than it was a few years ago. On top of this, wages have not kept up, real wealth and income have declined, and middle class people find themselves harried by competing and rising costs in healthcare, electricity, food, housing, tuition, and cars. People who thought of themselves as middle class sometimes find themselves descending into proletariat status. In the more extreme cases, people become homeless late in life, having lost all their resources to deal with job loss or other emergencies. Biden and his surrogates are correct that unemployment remains low, and that the economy is still moving along. The 2007-2009 period of the Great Recession was far worse and far more frightening in this regard, at least for those of us working in the private sector. Lots of hard-working and productive people found themselves out of work because of massive disruptions to capital markets and the banking sector. We have a different problem today, which is inflation. But inflation is also different because it affects nearly everyone. During the Great Recession large numbers of people never experienced significant pain, as unemployment only affected a minority of workers. While 10% unemployment is a huge number of people looking for work, it also means 90% of the other people who wanted jobs were finding and keeping them. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
#11
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| Posted by: Anomalous Sources 2023-12-04 19:14 |
| #10 "has ruined Creamed Chipped Beef" [snark] Do not mess with that man's $hit on a shingle. (I'm being mean. Ate it more times than I care to admit.) |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2023-12-04 17:06 |
| #9 An to think when the 1913 Federal Income Tax form was 4 pages, which is now 106, the count of both including instructions. It was created for the WWI debt. It was ORIGINALLY sold on, only taxing the Rich, not taxing the typical wage/income earners and not lasting more than 7 years. Somehow, Congress quickly forgot about the original promises. |
| Posted by: NN2N1 2023-12-04 14:28 |
| #8 Nothing is more fundamental to individual AMericans than our expectations of world-class food supply and quality. It is the most intimate connection we have with out sense of first-world living. It is a place where there are obvious tells of decline. I find the shrink-flation and price increases in mainstream, trusted brands like Stouffer's and Pepperidge Farm's is bad enough, but what I find increasingly across the entire spectrum is quality deterioration. They not only cheat on packaging and per unit pricing, but they have reduced quality and taste. For example Pepperidge Farm's Pretzel Goldfish are now tasteless and virtually salt-free as they have adulterated the proportions. Stouffer's has ruined Creamed Chipped Beef, rendering it inedible, and the Spaghetti with Meat Sauce is essentially devoid of significant trace amounts of marinara. Produce is routinely too early or kept past peak freshness. Canned goods are frequently presented with mere months of shelf-life remaining. Baked goods can have less than a week remaining on the sell-by dates. These are not the hallmarks of a prosperous, healthy national economy. This is the decay of fundamental American prosperity on display! |
| Posted by: NoMoreBS 2023-12-04 12:34 |
| #7 You can gaslight most of the nation during COVID, but you can’t gaslight all of us in the McDonalds drive through. My meal cost $10 bucks and the fries and drink are smaller. I am like the prole in 1984 that was ticked off that his pint of beer was now metric measured. They messed up when they jerked around our McNuggets. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2023-12-04 11:34 |
| #6 Trump or Biden? Meh. Economic worries and political weariness in Atlanta's bellwether precinct give a taste of 2024 |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2023-12-04 10:02 |
| #5 Ref #2: "At issue in Moore v. United States is the question of whether the federal government can tax certain types of “unrealized” gains, which are property like stocks or bonds that people own but from which they haven’t directly recouped the value, so they don’t have direct access to the money that the property is worth." Link to HILL Article |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-12-04 09:45 |
| #4 Cesare, that would be my opinion also. Keeping an eye on that one for sure, but nothing we can do at this point but wait and see. |
| Posted by: Mullah Richard 2023-12-04 09:41 |
| #3 "Inflation Is Your Fault" And Other Self-Loathing Liberal Lies |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2023-12-04 07:58 |
| #2 #1 Moore vs United States could skip the interim steps and unravel the whole damned thing. |
| Posted by: Cesare 2023-12-04 07:53 |
| #1 Snickers candy bar $3.49 at Circle K, smaller in weight and adjusted ingredient. Face it, the LSD have succeeded, we now are only a few steps away from having Venezuela economy. |
| Posted by: NN2N1 2023-12-04 06:04 |