[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by #-3

The thing is on a statistical level you're wrong.

Statistics can pretty easily be manipulated to create a desired narrative. Wages were driven up in a lot of areas which skews the data, because they’ve still stagnated or not kept pace with inflation in a number of cases as well.

I think people feel that gains were disproportionately stilted against them, because they kept hearing that the the economy was good, and the lost accesses to those great support cheques. They were very much feeling that they had earned the gains that they did make, and inflation was eroding away much of those gains.

I think you’re really reaching here by trying to get inside the heads of hundreds of millions of American workers and applying your hypothesis so broadly across the board. I’d be interested to know what kind of real world feedback you’re basing this on.

Most people don't actually view their own income gains as part of a macro story even when they are, they have a self conception of themselves as unique and special, so when they have wage gains, they assume they have done something unique and special to earn position in society in a sense, and when society moves with them if violates that view.

Dude, what the #### are you taking about? I can understand that some people might delude themselves with this kind of thinking but I can’t imagine this being the norm for everyone. Do you really think that someone earning minimum wage for example thinks that it’s because they aren’t working hard enough or is it maybe because there are no better paying jobs available for them?

But the statistics are clear, under the Biden administration, on average, the worse off you were the more likely you were to see improvements relative to others.

Really? How much did they increase the federal minimum wage?

Even if what you’re saying were technically true, on average doesn’t mean it happened for everyone. And guess what, those people who didn’t see the gains still vote.

Cumulative % Change in Real Hourly Wages 2019-2023

Low-wage (10th percentile) 12.1%
Lower-middle-wage (avg 20th–40th) 5.0%
Middle-wage (avg 40th–60th) 3.0%
Upper-middle-wage (avg 60th–80th) 2.0%
High-wage (90th percentile) 0.9%

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/gro...oogle_vignette

Did you even read this article or try to apply some critical thinking to what was being presented? I’m not trying to be a dick here but you’re cherry picking your data to present it in a (I’m assuming unintentionally) misleading fashion.

Your source clearly shows that real wages for the lowest earners increased by 17% from 1979-2023. Do you really think that because 12% of it happened between 2019-2023 that these folks should be loving life to the point where my argument that they’re fed up is an impossible outcome?

The compounding effect of such slow growth in the decades leading up to the 12% gain would render that gain effectively useless, or at the very least unlikely to be noticeably beneficial enough to make someone think “wow my life is so good I better vote for whoever held office over the last few years so I can keep kicking inflation’s ass!”

I generally don’t mind most of your posts so I’m going to apologize in advance for being blunt because I’ve gotta be brutally honest here, as someone who on a regular basis actually speaks with lower income workers and tries to help them improve their quality of life this kind of rhetoric is damn near insulting to read through.