• return2ozma@lemmy.worldOP
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    5 months ago

    What are these “tricks” for? Millions of us out here are struggling. “But you’re earning more money!”… Ok, a dollar more? While everything else has gone up including rent with a near 40% increase in the last few years in some places.

    To just be so dismissive of those barely surviving sounds like you’re coming from a place of privilege.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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      5 months ago

      You’re right, I missed a couple

      • Insisting that when cumulative inflation is 20%, and 10th percentile wages have gone up 32%, wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, simply because you insist that they aren’t. If anyone tries to say numbers, just say they don’t count.
      • Focus on the 20% inflation, because it feels real. People can see it in grocery prices, it’s tangible. It rings true. The wage growth is mostly at the low end (truck drivers, housekeepers, manufacturing) where most Lemmy users can’t see it, and even when someone’s wage has gone up, it’s easy to decide it happened because of some other factor, whereas $7 for a carton of eggs is right there in your face and memorable. And universal.

      This is also a little bit of the getting angry or fucked up tactic, too. See? I look like an asshole now, with all my numbers.

      Just making up a number of 40% inflation I haven’t seen before. I don’t think that’s common enough to warrant an entry of its own. Want to show me where you got 40% from?

        • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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          5 months ago

          Got it. So, back in November of 2021, someone wrote a story with a clickbaity headline about 40% rent increase in the future from back then, and now to you that’s reality you are citing to me. Great stuff.

          Anyway, here’s the actual numbers. The median rent went from $1,102 to $1,340 in those 3 years - 21.5% cumulatively. That’s what happened. So someone who’s low income who’s making 32% more comes out ahead. Does that mean that can afford their rent, when it’s $1,700 because they’re in a metro area and they make $16/hr? Fuckin A, man, maybe not. I’m being an asshole to you in this conversation a little bit, just because I know that you’re deliberately twisting things to make Biden look as bad as possible (as confirmed by you which was what got you temp banned already). But I’m not trying to be unsympathetic to someone who’s actually struggling and being honest about how they’re struggling.

          But maybe we should keep doing more of the stuff that gave them the 32% increase, and in a few years they’ll be able to afford the $1,700 or whatever it is by then. Right? Or not? What would your solution be, instead, if not that?

            • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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              5 months ago

              I don’t want to play the debunking game all night. I read your link, and here’s their rent increases:

              Rent in the area went from $582 to $907, or a 55.8% increase.

              Rent for 1-bedroom apartments increased 49.5% from $646 to $966 from 2019 to 2024.

              And so on. It looks like they sorted every metro area in the US by percentage increase, which yields a whole bunch of individual metro areas with oddball markets where some super-cheap pandemic pricing ended and so the percent increase in places where it had been $582 for a 1 bedroom apartment during the pandemic, was pretty high. That doesn’t mean the price of housing in general went up by that same high percent.

              Like I say, someone who’s actually struggling, I have sympathy for. You, I don’t, because you’re just out here lying with statistics to try to hurt the people you are claiming to have all this sympathy with.

                • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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                  5 months ago
                  • Replying to “the economy is getting better” with “how DARE you say the economy is good and all the problems are fixed, clearly that’s not the case” as a way of reframing away from the conversation of whether things are getting better, or worse, and why that is. Basically interfering with the effort to understand the policies that help or hurt by simply asserting that everything’s bad, so nothing being talked about can possibly be a good thing.

                  Let’s see if we can get through literally all of the bullet points if you want to keep the conversation going long enough; we have 3 so far I think

                  It’ll be an easy way to get your hours in at least