581–590 of 1001 posts
The results of the last election tell a much different story. If the economy was soaring for the average person then I don’t think control of the government would have changed or at least not as dramatically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That really depends where you go. Many places you will see zero homeless. Other places you can't throw a dirty syringe without hitting a homeless person.
Unnecessary demonization of the unhoused as only drug addicts. Have some empathy. Many places simply ship their unhoused elsewhere (I'm Canadian and I remember reading about Calgary paying for one-way bus tickets to Vancouver). In other places, the winters are literally unsurvivable outside.
Tech is the problem. The internet is global (or perhaps two or three regions), and winner takes all - so global value creation is being experienced everywhere, but being monetised in the US stock market. Take tech out of the equation and the US is pretty much on par with EU, and China and India are just burning the coal for everyone else.
The article discusses this and disagrees. Even in the same sectors and with the top 7 companies removed, sectors in the US have higher P/E ratios due to higher projected growth rates.
Not a single word about shale oil and gas revolution, that started around 15 years ago? The US now has the one of the cheapest energy on earth, and probably the cheapest among the countries that matter. Pour all that cheap gas and oil onto an economy that was already a leader and you get lots of impressive growth.
But is the majority of the population thriving? It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck. A handful of companies are thriving, but barely any of its employees.
US Federal Reserve studies indicate that the percentage of US households with no excess income after necessary expenses (as distinct from "ordinary expenses" as a term of art) is on the order of 10-15%. This definition roughly matches most people's intuition of what "living paycheck-to-paycheck" means. That isn't nothing but it implies 85-90% of Americans are not actually living paycheck-to-paycheck. There is another…
https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/inflation-economy-consumer-fi...
But is the majority of the population thriving? It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck. A handful of companies are thriving, but barely any of its employees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
US Federal Reserve studies indicate that the percentage of US households with no excess income after necessary expenses (as distinct from "ordinary expenses" as a term of art) is on the order of 10-15%. This definition roughly matches most people's intuition of what "living paycheck-to-paycheck" means. That isn't nothing but it implies 85-90% of Americans are not actually living paycheck-to-paycheck. There is another…
The problem that I see is that a million in net worth isn't enough to have a good retirement anymore now that rent is $2-3k a month in most major cities.
If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. If I hire a care assistant for $800 per day to do so, that's $800 to national GDP. The encroachment of the market into society correlates with record levels of mental and physical health crisis. US life expectancy has declined over the past three years, even as 'the economy' has surged ahead. The measures are wrong - and we all know it - apart from the financial press it seems