US economic growth, compared with other developed countries since the pandemic:
omg if we raise grocery and streaming prices again we might unlock Double Sparkle Star mode
The key thing is that wages went up by enough to cover increased costs, and prices stopped their rapid rise once the pandemic shortages ended.
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Could’ve fuckin’ fooled me
By which I mean: “the economy” does not reflect the lived experience of the vast majority of Americans. The middle class is disappearing. Our lower class is being crushed to death. The yield of the economy is going disproportionately to people who have gamed the system and installed themselves as our “captains of industry”.
Statistics are good at describing averages and medians; not everybody has the exact same experience.
You’re really missing the point of my comment.
Not at all. No capitalist system is going to give you some wonderful fair everybody gets gold at the end of the rainbow outcome.
But policies we had within that system on net made Americans appreciably better off than was the case in countries without them.
…for a while. And now the system is eating itself, and creating wildly unsustainable and unstable conditions that simply cannot continue indefinitely. This is amoral (or, many would argue, immoral), unbounded capitalism, and that flavor of capitalism is caustic.
Look at Scandinavian countries, and other social democracies. They still use capitalism, but they also don’t let it run rampant. There’s a sustainable and positive middle path that involves capitalism. We’re just not taking that path in the US, for various reasons.
And getting there means having the political power to implement it. Which we haven’t had since the New Deal era.