The market basket approach they use looks at the mix of goods and services people buy. So yes, it captures the fact that housing is more of a typical person's budget than milk.
It's describing an average. There are definitely subgroups doing both better and worse
U-6 looks at those kinds of underemployment numbers, and is doing pretty well:
This doesn't mean it's perfect, or everybody is now a sudden billionaire. It does mean that it's within the range of "pretty much ok for most people"
21
Americans’ Wages Are Higher Than They Have Ever Been, and Employment Is Near Its All-Time High
(www.americanprogress.org)
They're fracking, but in granite, rather than in an oil and gas deposit. So you shouldn't see the same kinds of hydrocarbon releases and contamination that go with fracking for oil and gas, or the same huge production of contaminated wastewater that needs to be disposed of.
A lot of boreal forest does need low-intensity fire. This spaces trees out and prevents fuel accumulation so that the trees largely survive.
If you let things go, you end up killing all the seeds in the soil when an intense fire comes through, and depending on whether the local microclimate has changed, and what seed sources are actually available, you can end up with a very different plant community.
If you want to keep that from happening, it takes regular application of thinning and prescribed burns.
view more: next ›
I agree that housing went up more than other parts of the market basket, and that we should build enough to force it down — indeed per your link rent is in fact slowly falling at this point.