Keep in mind this site is full of brain dead autists and the sort of people who work for and start companies where you’re rewarded for making numbers go up despite enshittifying and producing garbage products. It’s simply natural for them and they’ll just get mad and respond with trite pedantry.

We can’t have a good debate on this site because calling someone trite is now too mean, but saying the government is evil is a political statement.

Do you even remember 2008? If this is a bad economy for you, imagine actually entering a recession and you lose your job + house.

I don't want 2008 to be the benchmark for a good economy.

It’s a benchmark of a truly _bad_ economy.

If you make $100k and your grocery bill is $10k a year, a 5% increase in groceries (to $10.5k) only needs an 0.5% increase in salary to offset.

Why stop at $100K? Why not $250K? $500K?

If you're in the top 1-2% of income earners you feel things differently, this is understood.

Ah I see. Then let's do the median. That's $74580 from the census. So your income has to rise by 0.67% to compensate for a 5% rise in grocery prices.

For one, grocery prices have risen by more than 5%. (My own experience is more like 30-40% just in the past year.) For two, grocery prices are one metric among many in the cost of living, e.g. you also have to account for housing prices, energy prices, etc. And, of course, wages are not rising commensurate with the overall CoL, they have been essentially flat for decades.

So while your math is good, it's not meaningful. I find it very weird the lengths people will go to in trying to make one-off metrics reflect a different reality than what is very clear from people's experiences.

Did you switch jobs? A voluntary job switch is an average ~20% bump in salary. Job switchers and union members are getting the vast majority of the gains. A low unemployment rate makes switching easy, and low end workers were switching at a much higher rate then normal.

But job switchers (rightly) give themselves the credit for their salary boost. OTOH the government gets the blame for inflation and job loss. It's a crap job, you get blamed for the bad stuff, but don't get credit for the good stuff.

Average salaries are way up, in excess of inflation! Sounds like you should find a better paying job.

Median wages have not kept up with inflation in decades.

Suggesting that people job-hop is insane. Most workers cannot do this for a multitude of reasons, and most jobs are fungible. It's a very keyboard-warrior way to look at the economy, which is like getting advice on which car to buy from hedge fund managers.

This is simply false. Median wages after adjusting for inflation are above Q4 2019 and have grown substantially over the last 30 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Have you talked to low-wage workers? They switch jobs a lot. Long-term job stability is actually more of a corporate white-collar phenomenon.

You're missing the point. Look at wages compared to home prices, for example. You've adjusted wages for inflation, great, but that's meaningless unless you compare wages to what it costs to live.

In any event, others disagree with your chart: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

> You've adjusted wages for inflation, great, but that's meaningless unless you compare wages to what it costs to live.

That's literally the point of adjusting for inflation. You can of course pick the fastest growing components of the CPI (housing is already a huge component) and complain that we're not outpacing the fastest growing component, but that's arbitrary.

> In any event, others disagree with your chart: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

That chart looks at wages rather than income, e.g. excluding healthcare contributions. You can argue that we shouldn't count healthcare because it's gotten way more expensive for no real increase in quality (which is true!). But healthcare is a huge and rapidly growing component of CPI which we are using to deflate wages -- you can't have your cake and eat it too by excluding healthcare payments from compensation but including it in your deflator.

Also that chart just seems to be wrong (they don't actually show the source or data). You can do the comparison yourself easily enough -- take the average hourly wages (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003) and use FRED's graph editor to compare to a deflator (e.g. CPI -- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL). This is up ~10% since 2008. It's not massive but it's not nothing -- and remember the caveat above that this is an underestimate.

And re: switching jobs for low-wage workers -- either they are getting big raises or getting big pay increases from switching jobs, or the BLS is massively wrong. Which is it?