President Joe Biden goes into next year’s election with a vexing challenge: Just as the U.S. economy is getting stronger, people are still feeling horrible about it.
Pollsters and economists say there has never been as wide a gap between the underlying health of the economy and public perception. The divergence could be a decisive factor in whether the Democrat secures a second term next year. Republicans are seizing on the dissatisfaction to skewer Biden, while the White House is finding less success as it tries to highlight economic progress.
“Things are getting better and people think things are going to get worse — and that’s the most dangerous piece of this,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who has worked with Biden. Lake said voters no longer want to just see inflation rates fall — rather, they want an outright decline in prices, something that last happened on a large scale during the Great Depression.
I make $17k more than I did in 2016, but according to the inflation calculator, I make $15k less than I did in 2016.
The underlying health and future prospects of the economy being positive is great, but things are just eye wateringly expensive compared to a few years ago.
When the economy is doing well, that means businesses are doing well. When businesses do well, the workers are paid less. The economy is not your friend.
Or some people like to say “the stock market is not the economy”. Which I think points in the same general direction.
This is a popular sentiment but believe it or not real - as in inflation adjusted - wages - are now actually above pre-pandemic levels.
Is that a median or a mean?
I believe average but I’m not sure that’s particularly relevant here. We’re talking about wages, not wealth. It’s the latter that your Bezos’s, Zucks, etc can potentially throw off when measuring averages.
I was asking about which specific kind of average.
I can only go by the words that you use when you ask a question my guy, and the words you used indicated that you were asking if it was the average (mean) OR the middle figure in the distribution of incomes (median).
“Average” can mean either mean, median, or mode. You’re the one who doesn’t know what words mean, not me.
Regardless of whether that’s technically true, the context in my initial comment made it clear that the answer to your question is “mean”, did it not? I specifically cited those wealthy outliers to exclude median since outliers wouldn’t change a median value, after all.
Still, it would be interesting to see the distribution of these wages, whether the whole distribution shifted uniformly to increase the average, or it just became more skewed