chat

They're literally all talking about, for example, whatever a dozen eggs cost in 2018. I don't honestly remember so let's just say $1.75. And now they're like $3. Or they were the other day.

If your job doesn't pay like double what it did in 2018, and for most people that's the case, then this is approaching catastrophe every time you have to buy groceries. Exponentially so if you have kids.

On top of that of the cost of housing skyrocketed from 2020-2022-ish and has remained high while wages haven't gone up enough to meet that rise.

People are focused on the end numbers too much as well. A phenomenon we can all see and recognize in older people. "When I was a kid a car was only $5000 right off the lot!" type shit. They can't reckon with and accept the $50K price tags now. They just want number go down. It doesn't matter to them much that the entire economy is designed for inflation. They don't seem to understand the absolute dollar amount is irrelevant. This isn't just a hog or lib thing either... it's a flaw in the logic of nearly every "normal" person who doesn't immerse themselves in stuff everyday. They see big numbers, hear media man repeat "big numbers are big!", and Trump promises, vaguely but also directly, to make those big numbers small numbers again.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting what people are saying though. Maybe they would be ok with large pay raises and the prices basically just staying where they are until things are realigned to a realistic level. But Trump nor Kamala are capable or willing to apply the governmental pressures required for that change. Because they both don't believe in governmental powers except for killing and otherwise harming people.

Everything will continue to get shittier and shittier as tariffs take effect which will cause an unnecessary and un-absorbable inflationary effect due to lack of American domestic manufacturing. Grocery prices are going to go up especially on produce if all the people currently working in the industry, doing the manual labor, are suddenly being deported en masse instead of being given citizenship and proper pay.

Maybe Trump has deals with industry leaders like "let me do my fashy shit, you keep prices low for now, and we can set this stuff in stone for down the line." But that's way too much credit given to him. The man who hired John Bolton and was surprised to find he was an insane warhawk...

Seriously, do people not remember that the government shut down for like a month and how much chaos that causes? That Trump did something insane that made the stock market plunge like three times, each time causing the factories near me to lay off 10-20% of their line workers with no warning in panic? Like even before COVID things were really unpredictable and hard

If we have a massive recession, interest rates, inflation and housing prices might plummet!

Tbf housing (buying or renting) has gotten a lot more expensive since 2016-2020. I’ve been in the same line of work making steady increases and houses I was looking at buying in 2018-2019 are now out of my ability to pay (even by equalizing the interest rates). I looked up my old apartment from 2016-2017 and the rent increases since then are way more than my pay increases.

When it comes to consumer goods, I would agree that pay increases have gotten closer to inflation (but still not there), so I do think people will focus on the price increases without pay increases. But then again a lot of Trump supporters probably bought a house before 2016 so their griping is unwarranted.