Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals

Remember that the U.S. Dollar is one of many reserve currencies in the world. Other popular ones include the Japanese Yen, the British Pound, and the Euro. The dollar is just the one that is most dominant and for generally good reasons including sophisticated capital markets, rule of law, and the military might to force resolution of international disputes.

I think the main issue I see with your note about the difference in home prices is that you could stretch that out to say 1915 and 1950, and you’d be hard pressed to explain that economic growth was fake or don’t occur. Even in your example, the economy didn’t grow 6x, but how has resource utilization changed or supply and demand globally? I think a further analysis will show many factors going into that home price, and some of those very much are just simple economic growth and/or supply and demand of materials.

As always it’s also the location. Look at home prices in, idk, Toledo, Ohio. How have those fared in your same time period?

A couple of points:

- Headline unemployment _is_ "people who want jobs [enough to be looking for them] but can't find one". The metric you linked to is including people outside the labor force and then weighting in a fairly opaque way. Between labor force participation being at the same point as it was 2014-2016 and unemployment being lower, I don't think it's fair to say unemployment stats are misleading. The point about underemployment is still definitely valid though.

- I'm with you that minimum wage should likely be higher, but federal minimum wage has never been intended to be "comfortable wage in a major metro". Major cities have their own minimum wages -- e.g., NYCs is $16/hr. Making $32k a year in NYC would of course not be comfortable, but is doable (eg you can rent a room in an apartment for $1k/mo, live off of oats and rice, etc). It's not intended to be a "head of household" wage, but "the least amount you can ever pay anyone"

Other than these nits I'm with you that stats don't cover the lived experience of all Americans and there's more too it than simply vibes. However I also do think that some of the vibecession is due to increasingly effective media manipulation to squeeze money from consumers. I (coincidentally just now) wrote a blog post explanding on this hypothesis here - https://medium.com/@digital-cygnet/manipulated-into-malaise-...

The real question then is why there are no paying jobs in Toledo, Ohio?

After all, it's really cheap estate and lots of reserve labor...

Ah right, and here we come to the critical issue which is horizontal integration. Even shipping to Toledo is going to be more expensive, not to mention availability of variety of things.

Then you get to deal with the interesting "small town culture" vibe, and lack of educational options.

That’s not a sensible analysis, given how NATO works. It isn’t even difficult to see how misguided that thinking is because you could simply recall the mounting hundreds of billions we’ve lately been sending to two non-NATO nations.

> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive

Because the economy is bad, and this is a "drank the Silicon kool-aid" article.

In the most recent tax filing season data available, there were tax returns of:

                                        Top 1%       Top 5%      Top 10%       Top 25%       Top 50%   Bottom 50%  All Taxpayers
  Number of Returns                  1,535,899    7,679,495   15,358,991    38,397,477    76,794,954   76,794,954    153,589,908
  Average Income Taxes Paid           $653,730     $187,468     $108,251       $50,963       $27,891         $667        $14,279 
  Adjusted Gross Income (Millions)  $3,872,395   $6,182,180   $7,745,525   $10,613,602   $13,191,209   $1,531,038    $14,722,247

If we then break those into the actual groups, and numbers per group, then we find their Average Per Capita Income

                                             1            5           10           25           50          100
  Number of Returns                  1,535,899    6,143,596    7,679,496   23,038,486   38,397,477   76,794,954
  Income Taxes Paid (Millions)      $1,004,063     $435,594     $222,966     $294,234     $185,068      $51,225 
  Adjusted Gross Income (Millions)  $3,872,395   $2,309,785   $1,563,345   $2,868,077   $2,577,607   $1,531,038 
  Average Tax Rate                       25.9%        18.9%        14.3%        10.3%         7.2%         3.3%
  Average Per Capita Income      $2,521,256.28  $375,966.29  $203,573.91  $124,490.69   $67,129.59   $19,936.70

This entire "booming" part, is the 1-5%. Out the rest of America, there are 38,397,477 making $67,129 on average and 76,794,954 making $19,936 on average. The filing thresholds are "single, under 65 = $12,950" and "head of household, under 65 = $19,400". Most of the bottom 50% of America "barely" would even qualify to file based on the Average Per Capita Income stated on their tax forms. 76,794,954 tax filers "barely" qualify to even file taxes they make so little money. Half.

How about, lets look at it a different way. Anybody notice what happened to McDonalds over the last decade and a half? Corporate McDonalds used to have 465,000 employees, now, McDonalds has 150,000. 300,000 employee reduction. 1/3 remain. [1] Btw, they're also -5,000,000,000 under water in equity [2] while they keep making happy meal financial reports. 2/3 reduction in workforce, barely even covered by the news.

The situation looks very similar with almost every peer company. Notably, some of the main jobs where people in the bottom 50% work. Jack in the Box (-$851,798,000, 45,700 -> 1,090 employees), Papa Johns (-$430,933,000, 23,100 -> 13,200), Yum Brands (-7,674,000,000, 90,000 -> 25,000), Dominos (-3,976,640,000, 14,500 -> 11,200). They all went submarine on equity and started shedding employees, yet all anybody will write about is the "booming" tech sector.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:employees

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:equity-capital-and-reser...