It’s all about the economy (remember, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’).
We keep hearing statistics showing that the economy is doing well, but I have yet to meet anyone who feels like they’re actually better off.
I’m not saying that the stats are wrong, but when it comes to politics, you can’t address economic anxiety by just pointing to statistics and saying, ‘Look, the numbers say everything is fine.’
I live in Finland which is a pretty 'expensive' country, I come from the UK which is less so but not really cheap. I live/lived in the capitals of both countries pretty much exclusively.
I visited the States in 2019 (Boston), and then didn't until last week (NYC).
The level of inflation in the US for everyday things between that time seemed insanely high compared to anything I'd seen in Europe. How anyone couldn't look at the price of rent and food and whatever and think "5 years ago I was paying a lot less" and have that not feed massively into their decision making process at the (private) ballot box is beyond me.
There's been crazy high inflation of everyday goods in Australia too, and government officials went on TV saying that inflation is not really that high. They were factoring in things like bulk industrial products, which are purchased in such high volumes that if their price doesn't change (or decreases), the overall average inflation is depressed.
look, whatever the charts say is a 100% bold faced lie. have you seen the price of a little ceasars pizza? it's jumped nearly 50% in the last 4 years. my salary has not gone up 50% relative to my experiece in the last 4 years. most recently i got a salary cut. you can't make me believe the economy is doing fine.
Do all the population eats Caesars pizza? Inflation (or more accurately CPI) is a weighted average where the items that represent the biggest spending on the consumer (not on volume, but also relative to their income) is calculated and changed over time. Housing is the biggest item there, then there's food, energy and health services and communication. How does Caesars pizza change of price affects inflation: via restaurants, an item that has lost relevance after the run away price increases over covid.
For purposes of GP's example, yes, the entire population eats Little Caesars.
Even worse, my Kombucha went from $3->$4.
But, GP's example vibes with pretty much all food prices I've seen. McDonalds went from 2 for $3 to $3 each. It's really kind of surprising. Easy to avoid all this junk food, but price increases are very substantial.
Here's the CPI numbers for food [0] where we saw increases from 261 to 332. 27%
I don't agree with the idea of everything being a "lie" as they put it, but I have also noticed prices have risen over 50% for a number of food items. I'm a regular consumer of dark chocolate and brands that used to cost $2.50 or less just four years ago are now $4.00 or more.
But Trump _was_ president when it was $10, and now he is not president it is more than that. People are going to make that connection even in the absense of a ten point pizza price plan or whatever and are going to think that they will be better off with him.
>> are going to think that they will be better off with him.
This is what I thought, too. So it will be their fault when they suddenly find out that not only prices didn't go down, but everything is a way expensive than before! And as a bonus, their rights were stripped away.
From that PoV, liberals are in much better position now than those who votes for trump. at least they don't have any illusions on what's coming next.
I mean, there's more than one dimension to "the economy". Unemployment rate and GDP recovery is good, inflation curtailed, wages are growing - but obviously not enough. Then Harris proposed a decent policy to improve housing affordability, but that would only beg the question "why didn't Biden do this?".
Basically, too little too late. They fucked up that, and fucked up on the border, when there was no excuse to fuck up. I believe the Harris' policies would have been better for the economy than tariffs and deportations, but it's a moot point in voters' minds.
No one is talking about the real source of a lot of these problems: there was supposed to be a minor collapse/major correction of the economy around this time in 2022. Essentially, there were signs that people were preparing for a major recession that was going to be precipitated by a collapse in one or more major markets (probably real estate, either American CRE or Chinese residential); inflation necessitating rapid FFR hikes would have played a part in this. Instead, everything was backstopped by various means, and the Fed went for a "soft landing". This didn't solve the problem, it just shifted the burden onto people who didn't own the assets that were backstopped. A number of other actions (breaking the rail strike, a number of actions taken to prevent turmoil in securities markets) also forestalled the correction.
The result is that, instead of taking a big blow early in his presidency, leaving us currently in the recovery period, Biden disrupted every "attempt" by the market to correct. This allowed for common economic metrics to read as healthy, even while the portions of the economy that most effect the average American were distorted.
Your first paragraph should be printed, framed, and put in a museum as a perfect example of why the Biden-Harris messaging around the economy fell flat. Nobody gives a shit if unemployment is down and GDP is up when a pizza that was $10 3 years ago is $15 now. The answer to someone saying that they can't afford as much as they could a few years ago is not to tell them that they're wrong.
Her housing credit suggestion a) was less than the amount the median home price increased by under Biden, and b) would have only served to increase the price of housing further by increasing the supply of money available, exactly the same thing ZIRP did.
> I'm not referring to the credit. She had [all these things]
… that people didn’t believe.
She ran for her first 50 days claiming Bidenomics was working. That term was so stupid I thought it was a joke that conservatives made up. Surely they weren’t trying to say the economy was good right?
They plainly had no awareness of them, nevermind believe, but even if they did it probably would not have sufficed for the aforementioned reasons. Like you said, no surprises.
Interest rates remained relatively low compared to history throughout the 2010s and the year over year inflation figures for that decade remained below 2.5% throughout those years, during both Obama's and Trump's presidencies. Inflation spiked after the Feds debasement of the currency in 2020 and 2021, during both Trump and Biden's presidencies, when it expanded the money supply at an unprecedented rate.
Nice anecdote, but that's not how we arrive at the truth. Good data and a scientific approach does.
Now there are tens of thousands of highly educated credible economists with enormous amounts of good data in the US. It'd be for them, trivially easy, to constantly hit news headlines with a couple of papers substantiating why certain official inflation statistics are wrong and actual inflation is much higher, and we're all actually much worse off than before.
But there is no such widespread consensus economic research being published, I wonder why. I guess the quarter million people in the US who graduated with an economics degree in the past decade are all corrupt, as are all the institutions who report on inflation, captured somehow by Joe Biden... /s
> I have yet to meet anyone who feels like they’re actually better off.
Hi! I’m doing better than ever before. It’s hard to attribute that to a political cause, however. I expect to be doing even better in 4 years, regardless of who’s in office.
That doesn't mean I don't notice my grocery bill is three times what it was in 2019 after being pretty much the same from 2009 till then.
It's kind of annoying having people tell me this doesn't impact me. I'm literally spending more money for the same thing and my salary hasn't tripled in the last 5 years - my shares though. Which is kind of the point.
Three times? The CPI increased by 25% from 2019 to 2023. That's a lot but not three times. Major grocery retailers cut prices earlier this year as well.
I have a feeling that increases like you describe are likely due to lack of competition and much exaggeration. When I lived in rural area my closest grocery was over 30 min away. Where I live now there's probably 50 within 30 minutes.
It's not clear what point you're trying to make here. The comment compared price increases in contrast to wages. Wage growth during Biden presidency was also pretty strong on the lower end of income.
Middle class was probably hit the worst, but there's no way it's 3 times. Meanwhile American's are spending more on eating out then on groceries.
It's mostly overblown in my opinion. Voters just aren't always that rational.
To me, this is at the heart of why Trump won this election. I honestly do not believe your grocery bill has tripled. That's 200% inflation, which is an insane number. The statistics we have are that groceries have gone up ~25%. I have such a hard time imagining any combination of products that would add up to 8x the national inflation average of groceries.
But, I also don't think you're lying. I think you honestly believe your grocery bill tripled, and I think a lot of people have a similar internal impression about how bad inflation got. It's not useful for me (or, for politicians) to try and argue it logically. No one can check your receipts from 2019 and 2024 and say, look, things aren't actually that bad. Dems needed to kind of take it at face value and come up with a solution to something that people feel is real, and they just did not do that.
What is the 25% figure coming from? Not disputing it, just curious.
Unable to give US equivalents but I think the price increases were pretty significant on the lower end and less so the higher you go up.
Until a few years ago it was possible to get instant ramen noodles for ~15p, you could get 6 eggs for like 80p, baked beans for 20p, etc. All of these things and similar spiked massively very very quickly. There was also a kind of double inflation where a lot of the value offerings seemed to disappear from shelves for an extended period (e.g. I remember a patch of several months where those instant ramen noodles weren't stocked in any supermarket near me at all while the 90p branded version was).
They've actually gone back down somewhat since but what you're looking at is people barely scraping by seeing drastic increases in their grocery bills.
Similar issues occurred with energy costs in the last few years; along with the rates going up the companies drastically bumped up the standing charge so even if you almost cut out all usage entirely you still could wind up seeing an increase.
I'm in Canada, but anecdotally, in 2019 I wouldn't buy tomatoes if they were over 0.99/lb . Meanwhile today, I bought some at 2.49/lb, and only see them below 1.99/lb maybe once every 4 mo.
Similarly cucumbers I'd buy at 0.99; now I get them at 1.99 . Those are the ones I personally remember best.
Over that time period in Canada, I've also seen a 2 to 3 times increase in the unit price of many other basic grocery items, including dried pasta, rice, bread, canned goods, bags of frozen vegetables (peas, corn), meat, and so on.
The government-reported inflation numbers are well below what I've experienced and what many people in Canada I've talked to have told me they're experiencing.
Assuming you're in a Vancouver, is this true for all the retailers in your area?
In my experience prices are wildly different between grocers for some items.
I shop at whole foods quite a bit for staples. I have grocery receipts from 2019 on the Amazon app so it lets me easily see the difference. Organic canned beans delivered for $.99, now $1.3. Lentils, pasta, etc look about the same. This correlates with the CPI and grocery price numbers I've seen.
2-3x sounds like you are getting robbed. I don't know if it's a locality issue which I mentioned above.. but yeah I haven't seen anything like that in Chicagoland.
Since whole foods and organic food has kind of always been a bit more expensive, I wonder if maybe that didn't see the same rise. My prices are coming from fresh food/store brands from Wal Mart, No Frills, Food Basics mainly.
Actually I wonder if that might account for the discrepancy a lot of people feel between perceived rise and the rise shown in the data. What if the cheapest things have seen a disproportionately large increase, I wonder? That would be hidden when the data averages everything together. But only certain parts of the population, likely those who would feel the impact the most, would notice the increase discrepancy from the reported numbers.
I don't only shop at whole foods. For example I buy all my produce, usually non-organic except greens as they tend to look better, at a local chain. I unfortunately don't have digital receipts for that though looking up print coupon ads from 2019 to now they are about the same prices (these are sales). Bone in pork shoulder $1.50/lb vs $2/lb. Avocados 2/$1 vs 5/$3. 24pk soda $7 vs $10.
Whole foods gets a bad rap for price, but their 365 brand is pretty solid price for non organic goods. E.g. canned beans are $0.10 higher than the store brand of the 'cheap store'. Even things like chips are a good buy at WF. Amazon just has that supply chain advantage I guess.
You definitely have to be mindful where, and how, you shop if you care about price and quality. It's why I mentioned in one of my other comments that basically food deserts are where I'd expect to see these issues. This would align well with the rural vote. A lot of people don't have a choice, where as I have over a dozen.
So yeah I have no doubts the degree varies across certain regions, but that's kind of always expected. In rural areas you'll have higher purchasing power for land but typically less wages and higher price of goods, with lower taxes on those goods.
I'm doing better than ever too, but my family talks about how prices have gone up crazily while service and everything else has gone down. You have to be blind to not notice this, and the stats don't reflect what you see when you go around anywhere
Polling clearly indicates that the percentage of Americans who feel financially secure has been steady for years while the percentage who think the economy is in poor shape is increasing rapidly. It is 99% perception. People who are better off just won't say it when they think everyone else is struggling. The bull market in stocks and rising home values indicates anyone who owns any assets is doing very very well.
Posts on HN about tech workers struggling to find jobs and mass layoffs reaches the front page every week. Half my tech friends are laid off right now. That was not the case four years ago. Everyone I knew had a job, everyone had money.
That's perception. In reality layoffs happen all the time even in a growing labor market. I saw tech layoffs in my network up to maybe a year ago and almost everyone is employed again. We had a correction after what was the most overheated job market ever.
Uncertainty about how erratic US domestic and foreign policy is going to become as a result of the election is probably going to drop spending on US products globally, including software and high tech. If HNers were unhappy about tech layoffs now, well, IMO the public just voted for someone likely to cause even more of them.
We'll see. However, that tactic of fear mongering and emotional manipulation only works for so long. You can only tell the American public the world is going to end so many times before they stop believing you.
> I’m not saying that the stats are wrong, but when it comes to politics, you can’t address economic anxiety by just pointing to statistics and saying, ‘Look, the numbers say everything is fine.’
So improving the economy can't address economic anxiety? That's a pretty grim picture of human nature.
For what it's worth, I feel better off than 4 years ago. My investments are up ~20%, which is a lot considered it's all diversified funds.
Only ~61% of Americans have any stock holdings and most of those are pretty minor and/or locked up long term in retirement vehicles like a 401k. For practical purposes that money doesn't exist for people which is why a well performing stock market is a crappy indicator for how people will actually feel about the economy. My 401k is up 30% YoY but I can't feel that because the money is locked up for another 30-35 years and I can't access it via the stock market because of my job.
A much better view IMO would be median real wage growth vs inflation because that's how people mostly interact with the economy, simple day to day purchases of food, shelter, and fuel/power.
I think people stop believing in statistics when they don't feel it is related to their daily life.
Looking at the prices of bread, eggs, meat, car price and rent/mortgage interest from another country, it's a lot of burden. Meat shoots up really a lot in Costco, and mortgage payment went up 50% as well.
Talking about the cars, the exactly same car was 30K when I bought it 4.5 years ago, and now it is 45K+ (Same model different year). It's hard to explain the differences by "the advancement of technology". And not to say that back then I got a 0% interest rate and nowadays it's at least 5% or 6%.
IMO, for ordinary people, this hike of interests does nothing to prevent real inflation that they care about, but simply increasing everything.
I think people fail to understand is that a large portion of the population has literally 0 investments, let alone diversified portolios that are technically up.
These people give absolutely 0 shits about the stock market being up and the economy being considered fine.
We on HN are sheltered and generally have decent jobs which do allow us to have investments and thus don't see the impact as much as those who don't see the bullish line of the stockmarket driving their portfolios up.
What motivated people according to polls was firstly inflation, then a distant second was either abortion or illegal border crossings. You're pretty much correct. It's been pointed out this quarter that inflation has been abated and wage growth has improved, but notwithstanding that people continue to feel worse off financially, they remain resentful.
The DNC made some blunders. Leaving aside covid spending, they screwed up reverting Trump's border policy and waited too long to fix it. Harris was weak on messaging and came up with the Housing plan too late, didn't champion the CHIPS act enough. Also, the newscycle was constantly showing the US spending large sums both domestically and abroad which had an impact on inflation. And of course there's all the other culture-war/DEI stuff that isn't strictly within the purview of the feds but feeds into resentment.
The frustrating thing is that the economy lags policy, and policy has limited influence on the economy to begin with. Inflation rose because the US consumer was ready to spend much faster than the supply chain could recover from the COVID era. The Inflation Reduction Act could only do so much to soften inflation, but the whole thing was blamed on Biden by the average voter.
We keep hearing statistics showing that the economy is doing well, but I have yet to meet anyone who feels like they’re actually better off.
I’m not saying that the stats are wrong, but when it comes to politics, you can’t address economic anxiety by just pointing to statistics and saying, ‘Look, the numbers say everything is fine.’