News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I can never get past economic articles that miss the fundamental issue with "but inflation rates are lower!" card.
Like, the price never went down, it just started increasing faster for a while, and is now slowing down. But it's still increasing.
Like imagine if you went from 0-60 in 2 seconds in an Uber, so you say "slow down". So the driver takes 2 more seconds to go from 60-100.
The rate of acceleration slowed down, but the past acceleration doesn't just magically disappear.
And wages aren't keeping up, either. A friend just told me they got a 1% "raise" this year. After inflation, that's a pay cut.
Yeah but did you hear fast food workers make $15 bucks an hour now in at least one state? Plus people surely haven't gone through all of their COVID stimulus savings yet.
My favorite excuse for not paying fast food workers more is, "that's not supposed to be someone's permanent job, that's supposed to be a teenager's job."
Great, but we don't live in your supposed to world and it is a permanent job for a lot of people now.
Also, the idea that you shouldn't pay a teenager a decent hourly wage either is pretty offensive, but that's a whole other issue.
High inflation: I'm losing money faster.
Low inflation: I'm losing money slower.
That's how it should be read.
Rather than losing money, it's technically more correct to say that we're earning less.
The real trick is converting to purchasing power of individuals and showing the trend overtime.
Like the average/median purchasing power of an American year by year. Not just purchasing power of a dollar, but of the average salary.
Edit:
Are down votes because I didn't mention savings?
Like 50% have less than $500, over a third have less than $100
This functionally isn't a problem for most so I ignored it considering the focus is on poverty and not how I flation effects the wealthiest.
I think it’s a perception thing? Maybe people feel like they are earning more money than ever before but things cost more so they feel like they are losing money rather than earning less? I don’t know the answer but yea…. Prices are going up and they are still going up, and even if inflation is under control it feels like prices are going up faster than they were before….
Eating at a fast food restaurant I remember my first job I could get a burger for way less than one hour of work at my lowest wage I worked for I could get a whole combo meal at the fast food place next to one of my first jobs for about one hour of work…. Wages have gone up a bit but it’s not keeping pace so if i look at what my same job would pay per hour now it’s still not going to get me a meal for one hour of work, maybe only the burger.
I think you were being downvoted because while you may be technically correct, that means little to the daily life of your average person.
The last time I saw data on wages (pre COVID, so sometime between 2015 and 2019), when adjusted for inflation, wages for the average worker had actually dropped about 5% since then. Add to that that prices have increased faster than inflation across the board, even before COVID, and people are losing money simply keeping afloat. The price of a taco at Taco Bell is now twice what it cost in the 90s when adjusted for inflation. College tuition is up something like 1,500% since the 70s (thanks, Reagan). Something like 60% of houses are considered unaffordable to the average American today, compared to 30% roughly 20 years ago.
All this means that purchasing power has dropped, but "purchasing power" and "earnings" means absolutely nothing to people. The number in their bank account dropping instead of going up matters. The fact that people can't get a mortgage for a house even though the rent they currently pay is more expensive matters. The fact that people have to take on debt to afford essentials is what matters. To the average person, any of that is a clear sign that they're losing money.
They're not missing it at all. In normal circumstances, we've always got some low amount of inflation. If prices fell, we'd have an entirely different and much worse set of issues.
No, it would be a lot worse for the wealthy
Deflation causes people to save money and accumulate wealth.
The wealthy say this is bad because we won't buy products, but now we don't buy products because we have no money. Which is worse than not buying products because we're saving money for a thing like a house or planning to have kids.
Except for the wealthiest who want all the money and can't get what people are saving. They want everyone broke and all the money they don't have already, being in circulation so they can take it.
Like, come on bro, it's not complicated but there is generations of capitalism propaganda repeating that inflation is a good thing, it's just not true for 99.99% of us. If it still doesn't make sense, feel free to ask for clarification.
Deflation causes mass unemployment. We tried it in the 1930s. Didn't go well.
We have history that we can learn from where we've had deflation and could observe the effects. The wealthy are the ones not buying products in deflationary environments, or otherwise big ticket purchases for the rest of us. Those big purchases involve a lot of money changing hands, but above and beyond that, there's also a lack of capital investment, because the investor has no incentive to do anything except to put their money under their mattress, once again not circulating it. If there's constant low inflation, the investor is guaranteed to lose money keeping it under their mattress but has a good chance at making more money by investing it into companies who use it to hire people and produce things that people want to spend money on.
Do you think that every article written about inflation just happens to forget that prices are still rising? Or do you think there's a reason there are basically no economists anywhere arguing that deflation is what we should have instead?
I think media organizations owned by billionaires are going to keep repeating what billionaires want the poor people to hear...
And that with rampant wealth inequality what's good for "the economy" is rarely good for the average person.
I thought as a society, we all understood that by now...
But you don't seem to have gotten any of the memos.
What you might call a memo, I'd call a poor explanation to confirm your biases. Do some reading on how economists came to their conclusions, and you'll see why we arrived at an ideal environment of some low inflation. If economics reporters were only serving at the behest of billionaires, we're in an age of unprecedented access to information, and economics is almost entirely math. If someone wanted to be a whistleblower and show the math to back it up, it would have gone viral by now, and that still would have to contradict a working model of reality that makes sense for what we all understand about inflation. There will always be some percentage of people who don't thrive in whatever our economic conditions are, and that sucks, but I don't think anyone's been able to show a system where we can save literally everyone, because as human beings, our flaws tend to get in the way of that. Still, that low amount of inflation tends to be the best we can do.
I just can't believe someone that doesn't understand billionaires own media companies to control the public narrative still exists in 2024.
Because straight capitalism is unsustainable...
But you want it to be the only option and will accept everything else we need to prop it up.
Have a nice life, don't expect any more replies.
It's far easier to explain the world with historic precedent than it is with conspiracy theories.
I mostly agree with you, but economics is at best a heaping tablespoon of math and a sack of human behavioral psychology. Those guys really only know what's going on 6 months after it happened.