The working class is getting royally screwed.

[Mina]

Mina, you can also look at the cost of clothing, food, transportation, etc. Americans spend a lower percentage of their income for all these categories except housing.

If we take it as a whole, we already know what it looks like, because the whole "basket of goods" is factored into the inflation calculation. That includes everything people might spend money on, in proportion to actual buying tendencies -- both the stuff that got cheaper and the stuff that got more expensive. Using that data, we know that 40 years ago, a median family was earning enough to buy $60,560 worth of stuff in today's dollars, and that today it's $84,008. Overall, buying power for a median family is 38.7% higher today.

Even that understates things, though, since it doesn't consider what happened to taxes. Although overall tax levels aren't that much lower than they were 40 years ago, things like child tax credits, EITC, and tinkering with the brackets has resulted in taxes for the middle class falling quite a bit more. In 1982, a mid-level household paid 18.1% in federal taxes, total, whereas in recent years it's been more like 12.8%:

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/stat...all-households

So, that 1982 median family might have had something like $49,599 after federal taxes, versus $73,255 now. So the after-tax buying power is up more like 47.7%. Middle-class people today can buy almost half again what their equivalents could buy 40 years ago.

[Flash]

purchasing power is way down though, neocon.

oh look, the globalists agree.....not suprising.

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Some major categories of consumer spending

Housing: 2020: 34.9% 1985: 30.4%
Transportation: 2020: 16% 1985: 19.6%
Food: 2020: 11.9% 1985: 15.0%
Healthcare: 2020: 8.4% 1985: 4.8%
Apparel & services: 2020: 2.3% 1985: 6.0%

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cesan.pdf

https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-o...r-spending.pdf

[Mina]

Mina, you can also look at the cost of clothing, food, transportation, etc. Americans spend a lower percentage of their income for all these categories except housing.

One other interesting point:

Some people argue that inflation is understated, because of the way the "basket of goods" changes over time with substitutions. Like if people used to eat more beef than they do now, then beef is weighted less in the price index today than it was in the past, and so a rising beef price won't drive higher inflation rates as much as it would if the 'basket of goods' had been held constant. But, that cuts both ways.... and arguably cuts harder the other way. The CPI calculation also substitutes vastly superior products today for inferior ones of the past.

Consider a typical car. For inflation calculation purposes, a typical car from 1982 is treated as if it were equivalent to a typical car today, and their prices are compared to see how much costs have gone up. But they're not at all equivalent. Cars today have standard features that were considered luxuries in 1982 (power windows), and luxury features that weren't available at any price in 1982 (GPS).

Even in terms of raw performance, they're vastly different. Like take a 1982 Corvette. It had a 0-60 time of 8.1 seconds:

https://www.corvsport.com/corvette-0-60-mph-times/

You could do better with 2 liter, 4-cylinder Honda Civic today:

https://www.fernandezhonda.com/0-60-2021-honda-civic/

So, if not for substitutions, you'd be comparing today's entry-level economy boxes to high-end sports cars of the early 1980's, and inflation of cars would look much lower.

Or for an even more extreme example, consider electronics. In 1982, 8.4 megabytes of external electronic storage cost $4,495. Currently, at Walmart, you can buy 4TB of external hard drive storage for $89.

https://bramanswanderings.com/2014/0...mputer-prices/
https://www.walmart.com/browse/elect...1073804_514537

So, how much would you need to spend at 1982's per-byte rate to get yourself 4TB? It would set you back about $2.1 BILLION. That storage you can get for $89 at Walmart today would have cost you the equivalent of a small nation's GDP in 1982. And yet even that doesn't capture the superiority of today's product, since 4TB of storage in 1982 would have taken acres of servers burning huge amounts of energy and taking minutes to find and retrieve any piece of info, whereas that 4TB drive today is something you can fit in your pocket and power for next to nothing, with near-instant retrieval times. Yet the inflation calculation doesn't factor in how much more expensive such things would have been in the past. It just treats that external hard drive from 1982 as equivalent to the one today, and calculates the deflation on that basis, just as it treats a compact car of 1982 as the equivalent to one today, even though today's is vastly superior.

That applies to housing, too. As already shown above, square footage for modern homes is way up, relative to what they were in 1982. And quality is up generally, with modern homes generally having better insulation, more conveniences, higher-quality fixtures and appointments (e.g., tile in place of vinyl, granite in place of formica), and so on. But the "housing price indices" tend to treat a median home today as if it were identical to a median home in 1982, so that you can just compare their costs to find housing price inflation, rather than comparing a median home today to the higher-end house of 1982 that was roughly equivalent in terms of size and quality.

[Mina]

facts.

Which facts, specifically?

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Some major categories of consumer spending

Housing: 2020: 34.9% 1985: 30.4%
Transportation: 2020: 16% 1985: 19.6%
Food: 2020: 11.9% 1985: 15.0%
Healthcare: 2020: 8.4% 1985: 4.8%
Apparel & services: 2020: 2.3% 1985: 6.0%

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cesan.pdf

https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-o...r-spending.pdf

considering the bifurcation of society, percentages of income spent make little sense.

overall averaging can be manipulated too easily.

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

you guys are sticking to this percent of income figure.

when the purchasing power is clearly down.

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

percent of income means less because as the income of some elites rises they don't necessarily spend more for these basic categories.

this can obscure purchasing power being down.

bottom line, abandon percent of income analysis to get to the meat of it.

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

do you guys deny purchasing power is clearly down?

[Taichiliberal]

The two parties have a stranglehold on Democracy.

It can be broken.

Ghandi showed the way.
King showed the way.
We just have to remember.

[Flash]

considering the bifurcation of society, percentages of income spent make little sense.

overall averaging can be manipulated too easily.

So can any other measure you are trying use.

[Flash]

you guys are sticking to this percent of income figure.

when the purchasing power is clearly down.

Based on what? Perceptions don't always equal reality.

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

Based on what? Perceptions don't always equal reality.

purchasing power.

plus, in addition. past performance is no indicator of future success. that's the fine print on globalist stupidity. a tsunami of inflation is spotted on the horizon.

the villagers are in the mountain banging the ancestral drum.

[Flash]

purchasing power.

plus, in addition. past performance is no indicator of future success. that's the fine print on globalist stupidity. a tsunami of inflation is spotted on the horizon.

the villagers are in the mountain banging the ancestral drum.

How are you measuring purchasing power?

[Blackwater Lunchbreak]

How are you measuring purchasing power?

see link.

all those graphs are indicating crashing purchasing power.

are they invalid?

[Sailor]

Is there a particular fact I shared that you're disputing, or does "full of shit" for you mean less "wrong about the facts" and more "hurtful to my feelings"?



No. I think the key difference is compassion. Many liberals, like me, have been economically successful, but we see that as coming with a moral obligation to pay it forward to others, to increase their chances to be successful, too. I think the conservative mindset is more like "well, I made it across that bridge, so it's time to burn it to the ground, so nobody uses it to overtake me."

As for Massachusetts being conservative, I suppose it depends on what you call conservative versus liberal. In the very traditional sense of the word "conservative," you could call Massachusetts conservative since it's full of people who favor policies that conserve our natural resources, for example, and people who favor taking a cautious approach when it comes to burdening the environment with pollutants. In that traditional sense, the radicals are those right-wingers in a rush to burn up all our fossil fuels and dump that into the air, blindly taking our chances with climate change.

However, in the sense that "conservative" is generally used in the US, Massachusetts is about as far from conservative as communities get here. It's a state that has voted for a Democrat for president in all but two elections in the last 60 years (even when a home-grown Republican, Romney, was on the ballot). It's a state where over 90% of the senate is Democrat, along with over 80% of the lower house of the legislature, and that hard tilt left has continued year after year for decades. It's a state where the biggest city hasn't elected a Republican mayor in about a century. It's a state that sends Congress members to Washington who routinely rank among the most liberal in the country. For example, Voteview's rank ordering by actual votes put Warren as the most liberal senator in the last session, while Markey was 5th-most liberal. Even the most conservative member of Massachusetts's Congressional delegation, Moulton is more liberal than 60% of the House.

https://voteview.com/congress/senate

It's a state that was first in the nation to embrace gay marriage. It's a state where Trump lost every county in both the elections, and where Biden demolished him by over 30 points. It's a state where even the leading Republicans, like Charlie Baker, tend to be pro-choice, pro-environmentalism, pro-gun-control, and anti-Trump

https://www.boston.com/news/politics...ational-model/

If that's "conservative," then it would be great if there were more "conservative Republicans" in this country.

I highly doubt you have been "economically" successful Mina. Unless that is what you consider being on public assistance.