A Boring Dystopia

Well yeah. Who gives a fuck about a 2% increase in the GDP? Prices are high and wages are low.

It's going well for anyone making capital gains. It sucks for anyone else earning a fucking wage.

Yeah, corporations are doing great, the "economy" is a good indication of that, but it means fuck all for us.

because it doesnt matter how great the economy is, because only the rich and businesses benefit from it.

Meanwhile us peasant folk are still struggling to buy overpriced essentials and afford the worst, most unsuitable, barely qualifying roofs over our heads.

It's almost like the word has a different meaning on Wall Street than it does for the average person!

“Economic growth” = rich people’s yacht money

It doesn't matter that the economy is growing if it isn't lifting up your life as well. Hundreds of millions of people still live in US states where it's legal to pay $7 an hour. (2/3 of them) All of us are dealing with rampant inflation and crippling costs for utilities, housing, and food.

The government's position on this is that the Biden Administration has created 16,000,000 jobs, and while that may be true, I'd wager my savings that most of those are second and third jobs, because it's become impossible to live with just one in the United States of America.

We think the economy is worse because it is for us. Food prices have doubled or more than doubled in the last ten years and our income is stagnant so we make the same but everything costs more. We don't see any growth or stability in the quality of our lives.

Inflation is nothing compared to price gouging and price fixing by businesses that no one tries to curtail. This is approved of by the powers that be.

But let one opportunistic asshole corner the market on hand sanitizer in one region of the US at the beginning of a pandemic and he has to give it all away because nearly everyone thinks he is a monster.

No, no, the economy goes very well to the bourgeois elite that controls the state.The workers who are getting worse and worse.

Maybe if the average citizen would benefit from economic growth.

Because the measures that economists use to measure the economy are not relevant to regular people. GDP tells you nothing about living standards.

"Economic growth" = stock market up

Stock market is just the scoreboard for theft of economic value, it is useless as a measure of economic health except maybe inversely (if stock market is up that means more wealth is being extracted and funneled upward)

That "economic growth" is for the benefit of capital owners at the expense of everyone and everything else. I'm so done with capitalism.

Yep. Just reading the title, the "economy" is up, and people are worse for it.

The fact is, despite record breaking profit, nearly none of that "growth" is being provided to the people creating the value for companies to sell, and is instead being handed upwards to people with more money than brains, who have "invested" in the business.

The lines on the stock market graphs go up, and the people working for that company who create all the things that are generating the profit, are robbed, and their would-be wages are handed to the shareholders.

Is anyone shocked by this? Is anyone surprised by this?

Did anyone not know this already?

What a stupid article.

The economy grows, but the benefit is not reaching the proles

Stock market gains or shareholder gains mean absolutely shit to the average american.

If I can't afford housing and bread, shit isn't good. Let's change how we report on the economy.

We've known the ownership class was treated differently after the bank bailouts in 2008 which ran entirely contrary to capitalist theory as it was taught: if your company fails, then your company fails, and its detritus will feed growth elsewhere.

But it turns out some companies are special and are too big to fail because when they go, dozens of other propped up companies collapse with them.

I can't help but wonder if we let that catastrophe happen, would it serve as a reminder why capitalism needs to be strictly regulated? Because we undid all the regulations erected thanks to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007, and private equity is still demolishing huge chunks of the economy while investors get rich on bankruptcy shenanigans. This is the same kind of aristocratic bullshit as 1789.

We had a peaceful protest. OWS. Then one night, NYC turned off all the cameras and unpeacefully swept it away. We were told they didn't have specific demands. But they did, and their grievance was legit regardless.

So now, society is stratified. The ownership class has segregated itself from the working class and they won't consider grievances from the third estate. We saw during the Obama administration a _recovering economy _is not felt by the working class. We see now they're glad to install a one-party autocracy to keep it that way.

To be fair this was always the endgame. Our industrialst betters were sore over the New Deal. And later, school integration and interracial marriage.

I think their plan is to literally arm robotic dogs with guns and try to to rule us at gunpoint, kinda like Hebron. See XKCD 1968.

There's the "economy" and then there's the real economy. The one that affects the 1% and the one that affects the 99%.

The 1% love the current "economy".

The 99% hate the current economy.

Where was all that growth? Could it be in the pockets of billionaires and the owners of this country? Cause I don't hear regular people cheering about the extra money they suddenly got from their jobs.

I see prices going down, here and there. It's good but it's also bullshit. They raised the prices to make record profits and when people can no longer afford anything, they drop them. "See how nice we are, we lowered our prices for you", when in reality they're scared because people gave up buying their shit altogether.

Wow.

It's almost like pathologically fetishized "growth" (perpetually fetishized by the rich and their trained sycophants in the media, that is) is completely disconnected from the socio-economic condition of the majority of people on this planet.

Economic growth doesn't necessarily translate to an economy that serves the needs of a wider majority, often it means just the opposite.

...then it is.

Check your instruments.

1: The Sahm recession indicator triggered in July. Now both this and the Kantro indicator are signaling that a recession already started. Both have a near perfect record since 1970.

2: How the ‘strong’ US economy feels for poorer Americans, in five charts

3:

The secret ingredient is corporate greed.

I dare you to post a wage gap chart. Who gives a fuck if the "country" is growing financially, if like 60 billionaires take more of it??

Well, an economy that prices more and more people out of specific markets (like, the average person can't afford the median home any more and the cost of necessities like food, fuel, clothing and housing has gone up much faster than return on labor) might involve a rising stock market but it is objectively worse if you make your money by working.

The economy IS getting worse.
VIX yesterday let me know that economists think we're about to enter a recession.

Homes aren't going to get more affordable... Neither is Healthcare.

The other 30% are rich

"Believe"

Looks like you should instead be focusing on how these 70% draw the conclusions that lead to their "beliefs"

All economic numbers are bullshit

It's too uneven. Personally our household is doing better because both kids are working and the company I work for ditched plans to go public, and a couple of other factors. But:

Car insurance increased sharply (probably counted as money coming into the economy)

Homeowners insurance increased

Food prices increased.

Wages don't increase as much as household costs. Until the wages of everyday people are growing faster than their expenses, they aren't doing better. Again, personally we are, but I don't think that can be extrapolated out, most households don't have an opportunity to deploy more people to work.

Nah, the economy is fine, just like the planet. The people are fucked! Just like George Carlin used to say.