Whoa.

Greetings other C:tD players!

…when the bishops blessed the blueshirts down in galway…

Household economics are both micro AND macro.

The handwaving that typically occurs when people try to throw a layer of obfuscation into economic conversations is both disingenuous and counterproductive to actual fruitful discussion about the current state of things.

You might as well just say “money is wealth” or “what’s good for the goose”.

The reality is we’ve been chasing a short run fallacy for a really, really long time now and there’s more and more in the way of misrepresented statistics in order to keep everyone from examining all of the indirect consequences.

Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?

In 2023, the U.S. economy vastly outperformed expectations. A widely predicted recession never happened. Many economists (though not me) argued that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment; instead, we’ve experienced immaculate disinflation, rapidly falling inflation at no visible cost.

By every marker that matters to the POPULACE (costs of food, shelter, energy for shelter, cars, gas for cars, and medical insurance (required)) inflation has gone WAY THE HELL UP, shows no signs of abating, and jobs (in the tech sector at least) are taking a dive. Wages are not keeping pace with costs of living, and people I knew who were on the low end of “rich” are now starting to be as scared as the upper middle class.

Everyone keeps saying the economy is fricking awesome, but rent is astronomical, groceries are bonkers, gas prices are still at “I DID THIS” sticker stupidity levels, few people can get a home, used cars are going for 5 to 10 times what they’re worth, and everyone I know around the country is running a much tighter ship than they were during COVID LOCKDOWN.

All of these “new jobs” we keep hearing about are just a small percentage of positions vacated by layoffs. Companies let tons of people go in one fell swoop and hire new people for 1/10th to 1/5th of the positions at lower wages with worse “total compensation” packages.

The recruiters have COMPLETELY stopped hitting up myself and my employed friends. Not a single fricking “you look like a great blahblahblah” for almost a month when it was previously multiple hits a day.

As far as I can tell, we’re IN a recession, we’re just calling it a recovery for some reason.

I’m far less worried about churches paying sales, property, and income taxes than people making tens of billions of dollars a year.

We’ll get WAY MORE social benefit out of properly taxing the ultra-ultra rich than we will out of the hundreds of thousands of mini-churches who have volunteer receptionists twice a week or even the few hundred mega churches with jet-setting pastors.

Turn your ire on the bigotry and hypocrisy of a church that attempts to profess love and hate at the same time and out of the same mouth to your heart’s content, but when it comes to money, we need to deal with the robber barons. They’re the ones causing the economic problem.

Few seem to care…including those who will one day be there themselves.

What are those of us who care supposed to be doing?

Amidst deciding which bills get paid each paycheck, trying to find nutritional variety out of food banks (canned fish intake should ideally be less than 10 cans a month per person, for example, and even rinsing canned vegetables/beans isn’t doing wonders for sodium intake compared to fresh), trying to decide which medical and dental issues we can afford to address and which just get to be endured, and watching debt go to collections because food, insurance, automobile fuel, home energy, rent, and everything related to cars has gone up, what are we supposed to be doing?

In what way can we unite as a people and fix this?