I was recently reading
this article. After I finished I began reading through the comments. They were typical of WaPo comments "everyone who doesn't vote dem is a
moron" that kind of thing. It's pretty typical and is seen on the right as well. Just partisanship, nothing more, nothing less. But then I got to this
comment:
It stunned me because it is a complete 180 from reality. A reality that is easily quantified. But this person is convinced that they're right, in
spite of the evidence.
Except that my impression from a lot of different sources is that only major investors and CEOs think that the economy is good.
CNN reports that 71% of people think the economy is in good
shape. The highest number since 2001.
Wages are just barely keeping pace with inflation if that.
Wage growth was double inflation.
Wage growth for 2018: 3.8% (2018 was the best wage growth since the financial crisis)
Inflation for 2018: 1.9% (which is down from the prior two years)
There are more jobs, but they are at the bottom end.
There are 1 million more job openings than there are unemployed people.
Manufacturing jobs are growing at 2.5x the rate they were growing before trump.
In 2018 there were 2.7 million jobs created. OF those 1.1 million were in professional and business services, education, and healthcare. Those aren't
at the bottom end. Then there were another half million construction and travel jobs that opened. Then you add in manufacturing with a quarter million
and 1.9 of the 2.7 million jobs were good jobs.
A lot of cities where there are jobs, there are extreme housing crunches making rents unaffordable.
This person has a point, kind of. Housing is getting expensive, but there are jobs everywhere. Not just in cities.
The trade war has upped the price of cars and major appliances.
Car prices are up 2%. Again, wages are up almost double that.
Health care costs and premiums are through the roof.
While this is true over the long term, 2018 was back to normal growth of costs for me. Went up a few percent compared to 20-50% in the five years
prior. If we could just get rid of the ACA altogether, we would be a lot better off.
Xmas season was lousy and retailers are leaving middle and lower class malls, doing well only in upscale malls.
Here are christmas sales growth numbers by year:
I don't think a 4.55% gain on top of a 5% gain the year prior is "lousy." Consider this:
The two years before trump the total gain was 6.5%. The two years since trump the total gain is 10.1%. That's 55% better. That's amazing.
I see the second part of this accusation a lot in liberal comments. The part about store closings and whatnot. This has nothing to do with a bad
economy or bad retail sales. It has everything to do with ecommerce, which these lefty's take full advantage of (rightfully so).
So I ask again, how do they have such a warped view of reality? They're living in the same economy as me (I've seen my wage increase by 22% over the
last two years). They have the same access to information that I have (we all have the internet). So why do they seem to know so much that just isn't
so?
edit on 19-3-2019 by Dfairlite because: (no reason given)