29 ms·

> The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy. Which is kinda bizzare to me as a European - American salaries and economic output are growing the faste

> The biggest issue on people's minds was the economy. Which is kinda bizzare to me as a European - American salaries and economic output are growing the fastest of basically any developed economy, _especially_ in the poorer segements of society. By all accounts, post-COVID Dem policies have been incredibly succcessful. But that's not good enough?!

A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
I believe I can answer this as I personally saw it as an issue ( with the disclaimer that I think neither candidate even suggested appropriate corrective actions ). Our household is above average for US and the state and yet I still have near constant drain on my cash reserves on a regular basis. In other words, my real purchasing power decreased DESPITE some increase in absolute salary numbers.
astura 2y ago
Cost of living has outpaced wage growth in the last several years for most Americans.
- dukeyukey 2y ago
  I can't speak for what it feels like on-the-ground, but the numbers saying American real wages are growing fast, especially for poorer people.
  - S_Bear 2y ago
    If you're making $8 and hour and get bumped up to $12, that's a 50% bump but you still can't afford to live and need a second job. Based on the job postings in my part of the US, that's pretty much standard.
cassepipe 2y ago
Could this be that if you don't have a social safety net things are much more worrying economically ?
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  And because of that, voters have routinely installed the party for 50 years that promises to cut welfare?
  - cassepipe 2y ago
    I am not saying they're right. If you are told that welfare is a burden to society/communism and that you have to fend for yourself then yes you will only care about "the economy" and not ask for more welfare
sensanaty 2y ago
I'm not a Yank so I've got no clue about the reality on the ground, but is that actually true? Sure, the statistics say GDP is growing or whatever, but do real, normal working people feel the effects of those bumps? Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more. Companies are doing great, and so are people in the stock market, but is that representative of the rest of the country? I suspect it isn't
- thechao 2y ago
  The economic term-of-art is the GINI coefficient. And, yeah, the US's GINI is crazy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
- bombcar 2y ago
  The average person sees grocery costs rising, and is unable to move because they can’t replace the interest rate on the loan they have. This feels quite squeezing.
  - dukeyukey 2y ago
    Even this shows just how absolutely _coddled_ American consumers are compared to most of the world. Can't move due to high interest rate? In the UK, you're gonna get those high interest rates regardless, your rate is usually only fixed for 5 years.
- timeon 2y ago
  > Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more. Is there hope that this will change under Republican government?
  - anon291 2y ago
    [flagged]
ak_111 2y ago
American wealth isn't uniformly distributed. And as soon as you fall below a threshold of poverty in the US you feel it 10x more painfully than an equally poor person in Europe. The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost. He needs to magic the money from somewhere or simply die. Such a context for the story will sound utterly bizarre to almost all Europeans (including Russians).
- bluecalm 2y ago
  Yeah man, we usually die waiting for treatment instead. I had cervical spine issue which made it impossible for me to work, walk for longer than few minutes, sit in certain positions. I would need to wait 3 years to get it fixed in my EU country and that is after few years of paying more in healthcare contributions than some of the most expensive premium insurance plans in US. I paid out of pocket to be able to function. Whatever the solution to American healthcare costs is it's not what we do in EU.
  - margorczynski 2y ago
    Yep this is what a lot of the socialists in the US don't understand - they think you'll get the same level and speed of treatment in EU as the US, you just pay much less. That is not the case - as mentioned even in pretty serious cases you might need to wait 1 year or more for something that should be done ASAP, on top of that the quality of the doctors isn't the best. This is especially bad for well-off people (as in middle class) as you pay e.g. 500-1000 USD a month and can't even get a basic check-up.
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      This doesn't paint an accurate picture of socialized healthcare either. If you go east and look at Japan[0] which also has socialized healthcare the quality of healthcare there is very good [0]: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264225817-5-en.pdf https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264225817-5-en.p...
chronid 2y ago
You should look where the economy is growing and where the salaries are growing. It's not uniform at all. The entire situation (as an EU country citizen who moved to another EU country) and the narratives around it are funny to me because they're the same as the ones going around for years in my birth country. "Side X should learn they should get better candidates, otherwise people are not going to show up" way of thinking included, which has only led to further decline as the "conservatives" win and make the situation worse taking more and more seats and control in state controlled companies while at the same time pushing their own companies to absorb more and more of the budget. Yeah, not showing up because you did not like the candidate was a great success - if you wanted the decline to accelerate, that is. Well, good luck US friends, to you and us all.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
There's an economic component, and an emotional component. Economically, inflation hurt. Real wages may have come up to compensate, but you get the inflation first, and then, some time later, then you get the wage increases. It still hurts. Even if the wages increase more, it still takes some time to recover. Emotionally, it's not just the pain (and the remembered pain) from the inflation. It's Clinton calling people "deplorables". It's Biden calling them "garbage". It's the feeling that the Democrats have abandoned the working-class people - abandoned them for a couple of decades, in fact. Trump speaks those peoples' language. He understand their sense of rejection and abandonment. Those are the people that the Democratic party claimed to champion, but the party took their support for granted, and championed a bunch of identity causes that the working class doesn't identify with at all. Turns out ignoring and insulting your long-term base isn't a good way to win.
prometheus76 2y ago
Yesterday I went out for lunch. By myself. At a local Mexican restaurant. I ordered a burrito and a bottled coke. My bill was $18. Four years ago, that same meal at that same restaurant was $8. My salary has not doubled with inflation, but many of my costs have. No fancy economics equations can compensate for continual sticker shock at the consumer level.
- araes 2y ago
  Same, small town, and the prices keep changing so fast in the last five years that the restaurants went from relatively nice durable menus to cheap little paper plastic flaps, because they kept having to reprint the menus again and again with all the price hikes.
- xnx 2y ago
  The rapid change in prices have been a lot to adjust to, but consumers seem OK with it because they keep buying expensive goods.
  - themaninthedark 2y ago
    I would be surprised if everyone stopped buying food...
- vehemenz 2y ago
  If I understand the argument, we're collapsing the world order over the price of a burrito?
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Voters in small town America neither care about nor understand geopolitics. They do understand and care about the price of burritos. Have you seen any recent interviews of voters and their stated concerns? Have you seen the exit polling demographics by education level?
  - Klonoar 2y ago
    That burrito is the world for many people, and it’s already collapsed.
anigbrowl 2y ago
Most Americans have very little interest in and less knowledge of the world outside the US. Moreover, many of them don't want to know anything that would require them to rethink their position.
vehemenz 2y ago
We Americans are thinking the same thing. The reality is that America is in the midst of a dramatic cultural decline—especially in rural America, which has become more frivolous, callous, and undignified, even if they're no more uneducated than twenty years ago.
anon291 2y ago
[flagged]
mrguyorama 2y ago
>But that's not good enough?! It has never been enough, in at least 70 years, for democrats to do good enough. They are graded on this insane curve compared to perfect, and they always fall short since they haven't had serious (more than 60 senators) political power in decades, so they can't do much. Consider the Palestine issue. I wonder how many young progressives stayed home because Harris refused to say "I will ban Israel from buying US weapons", despite it being clear from polling that doing so would lose her some votes and undeniably increase republican voter turnout. But nope, they refused to see that reality, so they didn't vote for her "maybe we will tell them to kill fewer babies" tactic. Oh well, in just a few years the problem of Palestine will probably be solved for good. I hope those voters are happy. Meanwhile republicans can say "I have a concept of a plan" and say that harris should be shot by 9 guns and they get 70 million votes. My brother is the weird conservative that thinks "Trump didn't win the election in 2020" and "maybe we should regulate companies a little", but that didn't stop him from voting for the one shouting for violence. Maybe that's because he has, even during bush's term, been of the opinion that "all democrats should be shot", which he says right in front of me. I bet he wonders why we don't have a better relationship. It's always for something absurd too, like he said democrats should be shot because of Michelle Obama saying children should be able to eat healthy food at school, which for some reason made her responsible for the decline of school lunch programs since the 80s (a time which he did not experience). It's just another nonsensical thing republicans believe about their country because fox news said it every day for a year even though it's objectively untrue. Our state's school lunch program was better under Obama than it was when he was in school and yet he is sure that Michelle Obama, who has no powers as a first lady, was personally responsible for decisions our STATE made about it's school lunch program. I don't know what else to say. They believe lies, when I tell them that they believe lies they tell me to my face that I should be shot, and when I say "fuck you" to that, they insist that I'm so divisive and partisan. It's just absurd the reality they live in. It seems so stressful to believe that the government is going to send a liberal twink to steal your guns and shit in your litter box and trans your kid. But when you can go in front of a judge and say "nobody rational would watch our news program and believe it" and "we literally made up out of whole cloth a story about how the democrats stole the election, despite the fact that many of us were not so sure about pushing such a total lie" and suffer no consequences, what the fuck else is there to do?

A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago

I believe I can answer this as I personally saw it as an issue ( with the disclaimer that I think neither candidate even suggested appropriate corrective actions ). Our household is above average for US and the state and yet I still have near constant drain on my cash reserves on a regular basis. In other words, my real purchasing power decreased DESPITE some increase in absolute salary numbers.

astura 2y ago

Cost of living has outpaced wage growth in the last several years for most Americans.

dukeyukey 2y ago
I can't speak for what it feels like on-the-ground, but the numbers saying American real wages are growing fast, especially for poorer people.
- S_Bear 2y ago
  If you're making $8 and hour and get bumped up to $12, that's a 50% bump but you still can't afford to live and need a second job. Based on the job postings in my part of the US, that's pretty much standard.

cassepipe 2y ago

Could this be that if you don't have a social safety net things are much more worrying economically ?

mrguyorama 2y ago
And because of that, voters have routinely installed the party for 50 years that promises to cut welfare?
- cassepipe 2y ago
  I am not saying they're right. If you are told that welfare is a burden to society/communism and that you have to fend for yourself then yes you will only care about "the economy" and not ask for more welfare

sensanaty 2y ago

I'm not a Yank so I've got no clue about the reality on the ground, but is that actually true? Sure, the statistics say GDP is growing or whatever, but do real, normal working people feel the effects of those bumps? Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more. Companies are doing great, and so are people in the stock market, but is that representative of the rest of the country? I suspect it isn't

thechao 2y ago
The economic term-of-art is the GINI coefficient. And, yeah, the US's GINI is crazy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
bombcar 2y ago
The average person sees grocery costs rising, and is unable to move because they can’t replace the interest rate on the loan they have. This feels quite squeezing.
- dukeyukey 2y ago
  Even this shows just how absolutely _coddled_ American consumers are compared to most of the world. Can't move due to high interest rate? In the UK, you're gonna get those high interest rates regardless, your rate is usually only fixed for 5 years.
timeon 2y ago
> Cause the way it seems is that you've got a few extremely wealthy milli/billionares sucking up every single possible cent that can be sucked up while your average Joe gets screwed more and more. Is there hope that this will change under Republican government?
- anon291 2y ago
  [flagged]

ak_111 2y ago

American wealth isn't uniformly distributed. And as soon as you fall below a threshold of poverty in the US you feel it 10x more painfully than an equally poor person in Europe. The US series Breaking Bad talks about a well-behaved chemistry teacher who resorts to manufacturing and selling drugs after he gets cancer and finds out that his savings are no where close to covering the medical cost. He needs to magic the money from somewhere or simply die. Such a context for the story will sound utterly bizarre to almost all Europeans (including Russians).

bluecalm 2y ago
Yeah man, we usually die waiting for treatment instead. I had cervical spine issue which made it impossible for me to work, walk for longer than few minutes, sit in certain positions. I would need to wait 3 years to get it fixed in my EU country and that is after few years of paying more in healthcare contributions than some of the most expensive premium insurance plans in US. I paid out of pocket to be able to function. Whatever the solution to American healthcare costs is it's not what we do in EU.
- margorczynski 2y ago
  Yep this is what a lot of the socialists in the US don't understand - they think you'll get the same level and speed of treatment in EU as the US, you just pay much less. That is not the case - as mentioned even in pretty serious cases you might need to wait 1 year or more for something that should be done ASAP, on top of that the quality of the doctors isn't the best. This is especially bad for well-off people (as in middle class) as you pay e.g. 500-1000 USD a month and can't even get a basic check-up.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    This doesn't paint an accurate picture of socialized healthcare either. If you go east and look at Japan[0] which also has socialized healthcare the quality of healthcare there is very good [0]: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264225817-5-en.pdf https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264225817-5-en.p...

chronid 2y ago

You should look where the economy is growing and where the salaries are growing. It's not uniform at all. The entire situation (as an EU country citizen who moved to another EU country) and the narratives around it are funny to me because they're the same as the ones going around for years in my birth country. "Side X should learn they should get better candidates, otherwise people are not going to show up" way of thinking included, which has only led to further decline as the "conservatives" win and make the situation worse taking more and more seats and control in state controlled companies while at the same time pushing their own companies to absorb more and more of the budget. Yeah, not showing up because you did not like the candidate was a great success - if you wanted the decline to accelerate, that is. Well, good luck US friends, to you and us all.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

There's an economic component, and an emotional component. Economically, inflation hurt. Real wages may have come up to compensate, but you get the inflation first, and then, some time later, then you get the wage increases. It still hurts. Even if the wages increase more, it still takes some time to recover. Emotionally, it's not just the pain (and the remembered pain) from the inflation. It's Clinton calling people "deplorables". It's Biden calling them "garbage". It's the feeling that the Democrats have abandoned the working-class people - abandoned them for a couple of decades, in fact. Trump speaks those peoples' language. He understand their sense of rejection and abandonment. Those are the people that the Democratic party claimed to champion, but the party took their support for granted, and championed a bunch of identity causes that the working class doesn't identify with at all. Turns out ignoring and insulting your long-term base isn't a good way to win.

prometheus76 2y ago

Yesterday I went out for lunch. By myself. At a local Mexican restaurant. I ordered a burrito and a bottled coke. My bill was $18. Four years ago, that same meal at that same restaurant was $8. My salary has not doubled with inflation, but many of my costs have. No fancy economics equations can compensate for continual sticker shock at the consumer level.

araes 2y ago
Same, small town, and the prices keep changing so fast in the last five years that the restaurants went from relatively nice durable menus to cheap little paper plastic flaps, because they kept having to reprint the menus again and again with all the price hikes.
xnx 2y ago
The rapid change in prices have been a lot to adjust to, but consumers seem OK with it because they keep buying expensive goods.
- themaninthedark 2y ago
  I would be surprised if everyone stopped buying food...
vehemenz 2y ago
If I understand the argument, we're collapsing the world order over the price of a burrito?
- kube-system 2y ago
  Voters in small town America neither care about nor understand geopolitics. They do understand and care about the price of burritos. Have you seen any recent interviews of voters and their stated concerns? Have you seen the exit polling demographics by education level?
- Klonoar 2y ago
  That burrito is the world for many people, and it’s already collapsed.

anigbrowl 2y ago

Most Americans have very little interest in and less knowledge of the world outside the US. Moreover, many of them don't want to know anything that would require them to rethink their position.

vehemenz 2y ago

We Americans are thinking the same thing. The reality is that America is in the midst of a dramatic cultural decline—especially in rural America, which has become more frivolous, callous, and undignified, even if they're no more uneducated than twenty years ago.

anon291 2y ago

[flagged]

mrguyorama 2y ago

>But that's not good enough?! It has never been enough, in at least 70 years, for democrats to do good enough. They are graded on this insane curve compared to perfect, and they always fall short since they haven't had serious (more than 60 senators) political power in decades, so they can't do much. Consider the Palestine issue. I wonder how many young progressives stayed home because Harris refused to say "I will ban Israel from buying US weapons", despite it being clear from polling that doing so would lose her some votes and undeniably increase republican voter turnout. But nope, they refused to see that reality, so they didn't vote for her "maybe we will tell them to kill fewer babies" tactic. Oh well, in just a few years the problem of Palestine will probably be solved for good. I hope those voters are happy. Meanwhile republicans can say "I have a concept of a plan" and say that harris should be shot by 9 guns and they get 70 million votes. My brother is the weird conservative that thinks "Trump didn't win the election in 2020" and "maybe we should regulate companies a little", but that didn't stop him from voting for the one shouting for violence. Maybe that's because he has, even during bush's term, been of the opinion that "all democrats should be shot", which he says right in front of me. I bet he wonders why we don't have a better relationship. It's always for something absurd too, like he said democrats should be shot because of Michelle Obama saying children should be able to eat healthy food at school, which for some reason made her responsible for the decline of school lunch programs since the 80s (a time which he did not experience). It's just another nonsensical thing republicans believe about their country because fox news said it every day for a year even though it's objectively untrue. Our state's school lunch program was better under Obama than it was when he was in school and yet he is sure that Michelle Obama, who has no powers as a first lady, was personally responsible for decisions our STATE made about it's school lunch program. I don't know what else to say. They believe lies, when I tell them that they believe lies they tell me to my face that I should be shot, and when I say "fuck you" to that, they insist that I'm so divisive and partisan. It's just absurd the reality they live in. It seems so stressful to believe that the government is going to send a liberal twink to steal your guns and shit in your litter box and trans your kid. But when you can go in front of a judge and say "nobody rational would watch our news program and believe it" and "we literally made up out of whole cloth a story about how the democrats stole the election, despite the fact that many of us were not so sure about pushing such a total lie" and suffer no consequences, what the fuck else is there to do?