Cato Institute
Of fucking course it is. Are these people even relevant anymore? Their whole thing is to present some sort of “academic justification” for making everything worse, but the modern republicans don’t give a shit about respectability politics.
Cato Institute sounds like a badass organization in a sci-fi story, but nope, just ghouls
Over the past year, blue-collar wages rose 3.8 percent while supermarket prices rose 2.7 percent.
Those bastards. Grocery prices went crazy in 2022 primarily and people still haven’t recovered.
Over the past year, blue-collar wages rose 3.8 percent while supermarket prices rose 2.7 percent. Over the past two years, wages increased 8.1 percent compared with a 4 percent rise for food. Over 10 years, wages rose 49.5 percent, prices 29.7 percent
Notice how they didn’t mention “blue-collar” anymore for the comparison of the past 2 and 10 years - this is because they use average wages and most wage growths were in the top percentile. This piece got roasted by their own readers https://archive.is/erMlS
Regardless, fuck them for lecturing the BS you and I go through every single day.
focusing on food prices alone is also a tell because everything else has exploded in price way faster, negating the wage gains anyway
Food prices, energy prices, rent/mortgage prices, health care prices, and insurance prices rose. But yeah, tell me how my increased wage covers all that.
Now try this argument for housing, insurance, and education costs.
Shit, I just did this calculation on an alt.
I compared the minimum wage and purchase price of my home when I bought it versus when the previous owner bought it
1988 purchase price: $48,000
1988 minimum wage: $3.35
Number of hours needed to work to pay for home: 14,328
Compared to
2021 purchase price: $545,000
2021 minimum wage: $13.25
Number of hours needed to work to pay for home: 41,132
House prices increased at 3x the rate of wage growth
Yeah, this chart says it all:
And it’s only going to widen for the foreseeable future due to historically low inventory and slowdown of new homes being built. Plus you now have to compete with venture capital buying up homes in any area with a competitive job market. And there’s also the tricky dilemma with interest rates- the currently high rates make mortgages more expensive, but when they lower demand will skyrocket and inflate real estate prices.
We may have to find places with permissive zoning code, and build stuff with less embodied energy that’s intended for higher density.
I make like 17.50/hr. Im a chef
My dad said some shit about 1977 or 1978 being the worst year for the economy ever
Minimum wage in 1977 was something like only 20% less effectively than what Im being paid now. For somewhat skilled labor.
Minimum wage jumped up 10% in 1978 too
If we can get to a point where it’s the porks taking up most of the right’s energy by condescendingly explaining, the better.
Please porky, lecture us all on how rent being a luxury is a good thing, actually. Piss off enough people.
Rightwingers only care about oil prices and luxury vehicle prices.
“time needed to earn the money” meanwhile more people every year are working less than full time hours as more jobs get gigified or reduced or removed.
I earn less now than I did in 2020 for doing a job with the same title :smile
Instead of comparing groceries to overall earnings (GDP), they should compare a grocery basket to the median wage.
It’s quite possible that a low-budget vegan diet is still reasonably affordable, for now.
Whoever wrote this should have incredible violence inflicted on them
The cowards didn’t include a by-line.
burger prices say otherwise
I can’t even afford to imagine a burger anymore for my analogies.
Such a deal paying $15 for coffee!
its like they want revolt
They want to test out all the toys that Raytheon et all developed and built for the military using tax money, which were then sold to bloated police departments paid for by tax money, to blind and disable protesters who paid for health care out of pocket when they didn’t meet their deductibles because they had to get the cheapest plan available because they had no money left after paying taxes to fund the genocide machine. Circle of life. Or something.
I’m turning into a crypto gold bug. Don’t get me wrong, the gold standard is stupid as fuck but here they are arguing that everything is fine because food inflation is actually lower than wage inflation. Just don’t look at housing prices or gold prices over the last few years. Inflation is clearly always higher than they claim.
What produced these gains is not mysterious. Better seeds, fertilizers, machinery, transport, refrigeration, packaging, inventory management and data systems all raise agricultural productivity. Competition in retailing and global trade further push producers to deliver more nutrition for each hour of work on the demand side. The result shows up not only in fuller supermarket shelves but in long-run trends in wages, prices and time prices.
So food should be getting cheaper then? Well, yes they argue that, in a sense, food is getting cheaper. Just not literally cheaper. No wonder nobody has any savings. No wonder everyone’s in debt. I don’t think capitalism could survive true price stability with the rate of profit of being as low as it is. Marx apparently never realized how fake the economy could get.
No, this is part of the irrationality of the system that Marx talks about. Unless we actually are able to organize, it will get to a point where there is an expectation to take on debt simply to be alive. Not even medical, just simply exist. We will bring back slavery.
fucking hell I hate when trueanon is right
It’s the end of the mass market.
is now everyone’s target demoPorks win the loyalty of the poor by portraying their opponents and even centrists as lecturers
proceeds to lecture the working class themselves.
Bold strategy, Cotton
Measure the time needed to
Nah, I’d rather measure this lumber, rope, and very large blade that can be used to slice watermelons in half
the great vibecession never ended
With respect to both the arc of history and compared to other countries, food in the US is abnormally cheap due to a combination of subsidies and environmentally destructive overproduction. But the current price hikes are not reflective of an economy rebalancing itself with nature and directing more resources to the agricultural workforce, and they’re putting pressure on people because the economy is designed to extract wealth from people in so many other ways.
With respect to both the arc of history and compared to other countries, food in the US is abnormally cheap
What countries because my eyes regularly fall out of my head when I see US grocery prices from across the pond
As a proportion of income, overall food expenditures are lower:
Standard caveats apply, this doesn’t minimize the struggles of our food insecure population and the benefits are not evenly distributed.
I get that a lot of people have it worse than me as a highly privileged European. However I also “couldn’t” pay 50% of my income for food because that amount of money is already going to my landlord… I wonder how that quota should look like in a fair society.
If the GDPpc is about $200 per day (it’s higher than that), <7% translates to below $14 per person per day on food spending.
Most people I know work jobs that are anchored close to minimum wage, and among these I’m still unusual for spending less than $10 a day on food.
Measure the time needed to earn the money to pay for a meal.
LGTM
