American Economics Thread

[HighGround]

If I wanted to pick out goods that stood out to me the most, I would be using the price of Asian goods which has skyrocketed. I used the items I did because the typical American also consumes those products.

Statistical figures are based on multitudes of anecdotal experiences. When those statistics are tied to real costs that the government wants to avoid such as increases in social security payouts, those statistics can no longer be trusted. CPI has become a quasi-KPI that why quoting it verbatim is believing it totally is complete nonsense.

Lol No. Statistics is not a simple "multiple of anecdotes".

Numbers are not consistent with the things you are claiming. I mean fine, you don't want to believe statistics? Okay. I live around Seattle, one of the most expensive areas in United States.



Hand soap is not over 14$ at a minimum. And eggs are $3.29.

I don't know what to tell you people. You don't believe statistics, because they "must be faked". I guess I must've photoshopped these images that I simply googled? I buy my groceries, I don't spend hours cross-shopping, and I certainly don't fiddle around with coupons. My costs have significantly increased but they did not double, they did not even increase by 50%, and I certainly know that people love to embellish how "hard" life has gotten for them.

Life is difficult enough without the tall tales. I know what it's like to count every penny because that's what my parents and I myself had to go through at a certain point in my life. It is because I went through such difficult times that I know that people are exagerrating. Because if my costs were to increase by 50%+ over a course of two years, I would be out on the street, and so would most people, but they're not. Things aren't perfect, but they're slowly improving.

So I don't know what to tell you folks. Shop better? I live in an expensive area so it can't be that somehow, only my area alone is magically impervious to the effects of nationwide inflation, or that everyone on the internet who complains about them lives in some high-rise in New York City. In fact, places like Austin are routinely cheaper. That's why people move there.

 

[Staedler]

Lol No. Statistics is not a simple "multiple of anecdotes".

Numbers are not consistent with the things you are claiming. I mean fine, you don't want to believe statistics? Okay. I live around Seattle, one of the most expensive areas in United States.

View attachment 106403

Hand soap is not over 14$ at a minimum. And eggs are $3.29.

I don't know what to tell you people. You don't believe statistics, because they "must be faked". I guess I must've photoshopped these images that I simply googled? I buy my groceries, I don't spend hours cross-shopping, and I certainly don't fiddle around with coupons. My costs have significantly increased but they did not double, they did not even increase by 50%, and I certainly know that people love to embellish how "hard" life has gotten for them.

Life is difficult enough without the tall tales. I know what it's like to count every penny because that's what my parents and I myself had to go through at a certain point in my life. It is because I went through such difficult times that I know that people are exagerrating. Because if my costs were to increase by 50%+ over a course of two years, I would be out on the street, and so would most people, but they're not. Things aren't perfect, but they're slowly improving.

So I don't know what to tell you folks. Shop better? I live in an expensive area so it can't be that somehow, only my area alone is magically impervious to the effects of nationwide inflation, or that everyone on the internet who complains about them lives in some high-rise in New York City. In fact, places like Austin are routinely cheaper. That's why people move there.

I never said "must be faked". Quote my exact post where I said that. Can you stop pretending to quote people? I also never said food prices have doubled - which you asserted again in your previous reply to me. Can you stop ad-libing? I live in New York City (non-Manhattan) so I'm not surprised prices are higher than Seattle. But there is still inflation all the same.

I know the price of hand soap because I buy them from COSCO for a relative and he goes through them like he drinks it. I bring up the price with them all the time.

Do you deny that CPI is tied to payout increases in social programs? That makes it a KPI for the government and KPI measuring lead to creative accounting. They're not making up numbers, they're just doing like item substitutions that don't account for decreasing quality. Those aren't faked numbers, it's just dishonest.

It's similar to how unemployment rate isn't a fake number. It's just dishonest because it doesn't include labor participation rate. Because aggregate stats come from so many sources and calculation methodologies, changes in those sources or methods will result in close to any desired conclusion. This is an example, I don't give two-hoots about the current unemployment situation.


And you're not the only one who know what it's like to count every penny. I used to work at minimum wage in Virginia and I still base my weekly budget on my paycheck even though I make well more than that now. I remember those days and must admit I'm a little ashamed to be spending so much more in absolute terms these days - I see my saving rates these days and it's not pleasant even though it's extremely high according to the "average". I'm not in trouble these days so I'm not looking to be out on the streets any time soon. In other words, stop assuming everyone else's lives are "tall tales" or that people are just too stupid to "shop better".

 

[KYli]

It's not meeting 2/3 "gauges". You either have it or you don't. And you can use any metric of "unemployment" you want. This information is

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

And it's record low.

Stagflation is a term that uses to refer high inflation that happens at the same time as stagnation of growth. High unemployment is never prerequisite of stagflation.

Lol. So when inflation goes up it's becasue everything goes up. When inflation starts going down it's becuase it's "just gas". Come on people. Be consistent with your story.

And speaking of core inflation, even 0.2 positive inflation minus food/energy, represents a massive drop. This is what 12 MtM inflation looks like.

View attachment 106401

Gasoline price goes up and down frequently and more elastic. That's why economists would focus upon core inflation to monitor if the inflation is persistent or not. You don't even acknowledge such simple fact.

And core inflation is 0.3% not 0.2% and BTW I have been saying in the short term inflation might not rise rapidly anymore but next year inflation could resurgence. Not sure why you keep moving the goal post. From the very beginning, I said that inflation could come back to bite their ass if the Fed is soft. So your argument has no bearing on my statement.

But yeah, it's "just gas" man.

What a joke, most people acknowledge that the Fed and the administration are wrong about inflation being transitory. Your attempt to argue otherwise is laughable.

Biden and Trump don't even know what MMT is.

You know that they don't know.

You are saying those who claim and argue pumping trillions to the economy and won't affect inflation from both administration aren't speaking the same thing as MMT.

And inflation has factually slowed down, and continues to be rather tempered. Also, ignoring global inputs in a global economy as well as a highly disruptive global event is hilarious. Because there is absolutely no way that Ukraine and sanctioning Russia would have any global effects whatsoever. I guess they did MMT all across the world, that's why inflation was such a global phenomena

High inflation has already occurred way before Ukraine conflict at a faster and faster rate. Blaming Ukraine conflict for inflation is shameful and a matter of convenience. Ukraine conflict at best contributes to inflation but not the reason why inflation increase is so persistent.

So you're saying you lied when you said it doubled? It's actually going to reach 50% in two years instead? Let's stop moving goalposts and then trying to tell me what reality is, when I explained the "reality" of rents prices to you in my area, two posts ago.

That's what i wrote. "Friends that I know that don't owe a home have their rent increase at least 50% and some even double."

At least you should have the decency not trying to put words in my mouth. Before we just agree and disagree but now you are purely disgusted.

Vegetables and Fruits experienced a rise in price of roughly 16-20% over the last two years. Again, let's stop misleading the public.

Tell that to Bloomberg.

You claimed a lot of things, very few of which are reflected by data. Of course the "data" must be faked. But when I give you the actual numbers, you refuse to provide your own. Here's the a picture of the tomatos at my local grocery store, which cost roughly 2$ per pound before the pandemic.

View attachment 106402


Incredibly, they did not double in cost.

Most fruits and vegetables double. Chicken legs and breast price increase of 75% to 100%. Eggs price more than triple. So keep your statistic to yourself as it doesn't reflect reality on the ground.

 

[TK3600]

Quote me a source of data that do not contain conflict of interest. CPI is has conflict of interest because it is by federal bearau of labor.

Not all data are equal. Here is my data: US inflation increased 20 times over 2 years

Source: my butt!

 

[Fedupwithlies]

You know who else posted raw data and then put their own interpretation on it? Some who slept in class a lot.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

An article by Paul Krugman. He's pretty terrible, but he's an actual economist who puts numbers in context.

Although he doesn't give the specific numbers (which is smart) he does describe the trends which is more important.

I also have another picture to show people:
Tomato prices



These tomatoes are roughly 50% more than the ones HighGround posted, and also from a grocery store near Seattle. Given I don't live there, I don't know the previous cost but taking his old prices at face value, these prices have increased by 50% or so.

Also, he claims that people don't take his "data" and "numbers" and don't provide numbers of their own. In fact in KYLie's post he did give numbers as reported by Bloomberg, of all places.

I charge that HighGround is giving numbers out of context, putting his own spin on it, and cherry-picking data (which, incredibly is actually what Krugman's article was all about)

I just want to note for the record that Krugman's article was actually complementary to HighGround's point... but he goes about it in a much better-argued response noting trends and how they differ instead of going month-to-month (going so far as to say the decrease in inflation in December was probably a blip, as most people consider) and his ultimate conclusion is:

No doubt this debate will continue, as economic debates tend to. But I think we’re approaching the point at which Team Stagflation will have to do what Team Transitory did a while back: admit that they got it wrong, and try to figure out why.

I hate economics.

 

[Stierlitz]

US-based employers announced 102.943K job cuts in January of 2023, the most since September of 2020, and compared to 43.651K in December. It is also the highest January total since 2009, when 241.749K were announced, as companies are preparing for an economic slowdown, cutting workers and slowing hiring. The technology sector announced the most cuts with 41.829K 41% of all cuts, the second highest on record. Retailers announced the second-most cuts with 13K; real estate 2.191K as housing demand and prices fall. Meanwhile, employers announced plans to hire 32.764K workers, primarily in entertainment/leisure. This is down 58% from a year earlier and 37% from December 2022. ​

source: Challenger, Gray and Christmas, Inc.​

 

[HighGround]

I never said "must be faked". Quote my exact post where I said that. Can you stop pretending to quote people? I also never said food prices have doubled - which you asserted again in your previous reply to me. Can you stop ad-libing? I live in New York City (non-Manhattan) so I'm not surprised prices are higher than Seattle. But there is still inflation all the same.

I never denied there was inflation. In fact, I emphasized that we can quantify it. If you didn't have a measurable issue with my post, I am puzzled by your insistence to exaggerate and continue to debate this topic with me.

I know the price of hand soap because I buy them from COSCO for a relative and he goes through them like he drinks it. I bring up the price with them all the time.

Do you deny that CPI is tied to payout increases in social programs? That makes it a KPI for the government and KPI measuring lead to creative accounting. They're not making up numbers, they're just doing like item substitutions that don't account for decreasing quality. Those aren't faked numbers, it's just dishonest.

The government doesn't control the inflation rate. At least not in the sense that there is a cabal of executives all trying to minimize social security payments. The Fed doesn't even use CPI. CPI isn't a KPI. It's a measurable indicator that takes quite a bit of effort and money to obtain. Moreover, CPI itself isn't used by the SSA. Different social service programs can will often use different CPI indicators for their COLA adjustments. Indeed, CPI itself offers a lot of different measures based on which parameters are left out or left in.

One common criticism of BLS and CPI is that they don't properly calculate housing in CPI. Which ignores that of course, CPI has a metric that includes housing costs, and one that excludes housing, and breaks down different subsets of "housing", allowing critics to create their own metrics using the data.

It's similar to how unemployment rate isn't a fake number. It's just dishonest because it doesn't include labor participation rate. Because aggregate stats come from so many sources and calculation methodologies, changes in those sources or methods will result in close to any desired conclusion. This is an example, I don't give two-hoots about the current unemployment situation.

There is an unemployment measure that includes discouraged workers or those out of the labor pool. It's called U7 unemployment. Moreover, the BLS, the same agency that provides unemployment data, also provides labor participation rate. All of this data is public, well publicized, and the LPR itself is regularly mentioned in monthly unemployment report.

Conversely, I also don't particularly give a hoot about the labor participation rate. It is a number that is simply not all that informative. There are a number of reasons why somebody would choose not to work. Even when the economy was universally considered "good" (whatever that means) by pundits, working people, and Trump supporters, the labor force participation rate was still static. The causes of this are interesting, from an economics level, but it is not particularly relevant when we look at the health of the economy.

And you're not the only one who know what it's like to count every penny. I used to work at minimum wage in Virginia and I still base my weekly budget on my paycheck even though I make well more than that now. I remember those days and must admit I'm a little ashamed to be spending so much more in absolute terms these days - I see my saving rates these days and it's not pleasant even though it's extremely high according to the "average". I'm not in trouble these days so I'm not looking to be out on the streets any time soon. In other words, stop assuming everyone else's lives are "tall tales" or that people are just too stupid to "shop better".

I will assume that people are telling "tall tales" because that's what they are if they are inconsistent with reality. This is exactly the case with your 6$ and 8$ eggs. Yes, I suppose it can occur in fairly rare and limited cases, but it is by no means the norm, despite people's attempts to convince us so.

Now I understand that people like to whine and exchange grievances when with friends or in bars, and that's fine. It is completely different when these same people go on Forum boards and attempt to pass this data off as a typical experience of an average American. As I said before, life is hard enough without these over exaggerations.

 

[Abominable]

I think this sort of questioning perfectly illustrates the ignorance with which people approach this subject.

This is the price of eggs over time.


As you can see, the price of eggs has skyrocketed since the beginning of January 2022. Now, you might think, "My god! The inflation is wreaking havoc in the food markets!" Whereas in reality, a deadly avian flu has hit Chicken farms across America, killing millions of birds. This has been going on since

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

.

By contrast, every single other category, while higher in price, did not "double."


Understandably, reality isn't going to make people happy, especially if it runs counter to their biases and established beliefs, but numbers don't lie. But for the record, I can still buy eggs 3$ or under. It's more expensive than what I'm used to, but I'm not going to run around and lie about how my household expenses have literally doubled. Majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. If our expenses literally doubled, I'd be seeing a housing crash, Great Depression level homelessness, and a general collapse of society.

Consumer prices are not as simple as you are making out. Egg producers are at the behest of retailers, who can use their enormous purchasing power to force passing costs on to them.

It doesn't even need to be the producers taking the loss, it could be the supermarkets themselves. The concept of a loss leader is a proven business practice for essentials like bread, milk, eggs and soap.

Whether you will acknowledge it or not, operating costs for the agriculture and retail sector have increased significantly. If you don't see a corresponding price increase in the end product, some form of manipulation is occurring. In other words, it is the capitalist equivalent of Soviet era price controls. America isn't much of a welfare state so things must be bad if they're resorting to this.

What's likely is that it's all three, producers, suppliers and the consumer all taking a loss - hence the modest rise in prices.

It's also very convenient that we're seeing mass culling of chickens to prevent avian flu. It certainly would be fortunate given it's probably more economical to kill the birds than to sell them or their eggs to the supermarkets.

 

[HighGround]

Stagflation is a term that uses to refer high inflation that happens at the same time as stagnation of growth. High unemployment is never prerequisite of stagflation.

Yes, it is.

Gasoline price goes up and down frequently and more elastic. That's why economists would focus upon core inflation to monitor if the inflation is persistent or not. You don't even acknowledge such simple fact.

I gave you the numbers for core inflation. What do you think CPI minus food and energy is? It's 0.3% for December, it's literally all in the report. It's fact, that inflation has been significantly lower over the last 3-6 months. Your argumentation is just either dishonest or you don't actually read my replies.

And core inflation is 0.3% not 0.2% and BTW I have been saying in the short term inflation might not rise rapidly anymore but next year inflation could resurgence. Not sure why you keep moving the goal post. From the very beginning, I said that inflation could come back to bite their ass if the Fed is soft. So your argument has no bearing on my statement.

What goal posts am I moving? You literally said that inflation was still "very high" and that Fed's inaction in early 2022 caused inflation to go out of control. I provided data that directly contradicted you. Inflation stabilized in the last 3-6 months.

What a joke, most people acknowledge that the Fed and the administration are wrong about inflation being transitory. Your attempt to argue otherwise is laughable.

The only thing that's "laughable" is your inability to counter data that's publicly available, that directly contradicts you. What's next? You're going to post up Shadowstat as proof of what the real inflation number is? Lol.

You know that they don't know.

You are saying those who claim and argue pumping trillions to the economy and won't affect inflation from both administration aren't speaking the same thing as MMT.

Uh yeah, they don't. Do you even know what MMT is? lol

High inflation has already occurred way before Ukraine conflict at a faster and faster rate. Blaming Ukraine conflict for inflation is shameful and a matter of convenience. Ukraine conflict at best contributes to inflation but not the reason why inflation increase is so persistent.

No it didn't. Lol. Jesus Christ, why are you debating what is literally measurable. Inflation pre-Ukraine can be characterized either just as intense as post-Ukraine, or more intense. This is for both CPI minus food and energy and CPI with food and energy.

What an absurdity.




Just look at the numbers As it clearly indicates. Core inflation was actually less intense over the whole year in 2022, especially in the latter half of 2022 than in 2021. And overall inflation was also measurably less.

That's what i wrote. "Friends that I know that don't owe a home have their rent increase at least 50% and some even double."

All your friends have bad landlords.

Rent increases on average are 20% in New York, probably the 2nd most expensive metropolitan area in United States after LA.

At least you should have the decency not trying to put words in my mouth. Before we just agree and disagree but now you are purely disgusted.


Tell that to Bloomberg.

Most fruits and vegetables double. Chicken legs and breast price increase of 75% to 100%. Eggs price more than triple. So keep your statistic to yourself as it doesn't reflect reality on the ground.

I didn't put anything in your mouth. You said it yourself. I'm happy to keep proving you wrong, and you're welcome to reject statistics. If you want to base policy on how you feel instead of what is reflective of reality, by all means. All I'm pointing out, is that your opinion, is not backed up by any numbers from anyone reputable.

 

[HighGround]

You know who else posted raw data and then put their own interpretation on it? Some who slept in class a lot.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

An article by Paul Krugman. He's pretty terrible, but he's an actual economist who puts numbers in context.

Although he doesn't give the specific numbers (which is smart) he does describe the trends which is more important.

I also have another picture to show people:
Tomato prices

View attachment 106417

These tomatoes are roughly 50% more than the ones HighGround posted, and also from a grocery store near Seattle. Given I don't live there, I don't know the previous cost but taking his old prices at face value, these prices have increased by 50% or so.

Also, he claims that people don't take his "data" and "numbers" and don't provide numbers of their own. In fact in KYLie's post he did give numbers as reported by Bloomberg, of all places.

I charge that HighGround is giving numbers out of context, putting his own spin on it, and cherry-picking data (which, incredibly is actually what Krugman's article was all about)

I just want to note for the record that Krugman's article was actually complementary to HighGround's point... but he goes about it in a much better-argued response noting trends and how they differ instead of going month-to-month (going so far as to say the decrease in inflation in December was probably a blip, as most people consider) and his ultimate conclusion is:



I fucking hate economics.

I posted public avaiable data, that was dismissed as "biased" and one guy even basically implied that the data shouldn't be trusted.

They asked for my personal experience, I gave them the closest store I could think of in my area and posted the prices.

But yes. I definitely picked out all of the publicly available numbers and posted the anecdotal data they requested.

But sure, I cherry picked my screenshot. Just like I cherry picked this one.




and this one



And I am definitely lying all about the handsoap and tomato prices too.

If people are going to make claims about how everything doubled in price, at least make the effort of trying to prove it instead of relying purely on what "your friends" tell you.