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The gaslighting bothers me the most. “The soft landing worked! The economy is great! Look at all these jobs!” Are they good jobs? Do they pay enough to live? Why has the price of everything gone up so much? It’s eerie being lied to on such a massive scale like this. Very much a superb example of “don’t piss in my ear and tell me it’s raining.”
It's purposeful. The system is collapsing and the only option they have is to lie to people to convince them to continue participating.
"you now have to spend more money to survive" -> "people are now spending more money" -> "the GDP is going up" -> "the economy is doing well!"
The CPI is not the economy, the stock market is not the economy, wages and unemployment are not the economy, there is no one measure that effectively captures what's happening with the economy.
This exactly, and the people making policy are so far out of touch that they don't even have a friend of a friend that's as impacted as we are by this insane inflation.
Worst thing is, we weren't getting cost of living increases before inflation went batshit.
I mean, they are out of touch, but don't believe for a second that they don't know what they're doing.
For example, why would a politican regulate the housing market and bolster tenants' rights when they and a bunch of their buddies are making bank?
There is the Consumer Sentiment Index which at least tries to quantify what people are feeling about the economy. According to the recent report, 48% of consumers expect bad times in the year ahead for business conditions, which is down from the high of June 2022 when 79% of consumers expected challenging times ahead for the economy.
Since the Great Depression (about a century ago!) The US government has been fudging the numbers so that the economy looks better than it is. Inflation, unemployment, wages, etc. are qualifed with modifiers (because why count anyone who stopped looking for work?).
The system intends to gaslight us and convince us the economy is doing great. We're down on our luck, or we suck and deserve to be on the brink of homelessness and starvation.
After all, if our government was transparent with us, we might see it's not all because of corporate greed and anticompetitive markets. We might realize regulatory capture has real consequences. We might pressure the government to actually serve the pubic and install some effective social safety nets. And then the companies would have to pay us living wages for short work weeks and provide a non-toxic, non-hazardous work environment.
And our plutocrats won't have that.
Exactly. There may be a numerous jobs, but do they pay well?
I know what a crab being brought to boil feels like now.
King crab sounds hella good right now, not gonna lie
Better than a garbage-ass McChicken ever was. I remember eating them when I was on the struggle, before covid. The only good thing about them back then was the price; now they don't even have that going for them.
🤔 Someone ought to make a !cookathome@lemmy.cafe sub. EDIT: there we go :P
King crab are gone mon ami, their population is collapsing
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a41854680/crab-shortage-billion-crabs-missing/
McChicken is all we gonna have soon
Wasn’t that meme debunked? It’s actually: a frog with brain removed will not jump out of a pot slowly brought to boil.
A frog with its brain intact will jump out no problem.
.
Not a meal - that's just the burger. $8.30 AUD (5.42usd). Ridiculous.
How in the actual fuck are you all surviving down there? Are you like hunting down the kangaroos for sustenance?
It’s my understanding that kangaroos are plentiful. I’ve had kangaroo meat and it’s pretty tasty, like very lean beef.
Corporate greedflation.
I was gonna say, this post seems pretty disingenuous to blame "every public figurehead" for corporate greed. Maybe if we better taxed and regulated those companies this wouldn't be happening. If only some public figureheads had literally that exact platform.
Hey now, that's just not true (!)
If you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work an extra shift, maybe sell some things you don't need, you can afford a McChicken Sandwich (!)
Honestly anyone who isn't willing to work an extra 5 or 6 jobs has no right to complain.
Even then, you could be making passive income.
Yeah, just buy a house and rent it, demand for housing is super high so you can charge as much as you want!
Have you seen the price of boots these days? More like pull yourself up by your dirty socks (cost probably $15 to wash) and then get kicked out of any building you walk into for being in your socks then go find a hole somewhere without anti-homeless spikes to crawl into and die then your next of kin get the outrageous bill for the ambulance that was called, the cycle repeats and basically everything will be fine haha!
I am and old millennial and have pretty much considered my wife and I somewhat upper middle class. We never paid attention to grocery prices, took a vacation every year and were able to put away money for retirement. And while I am fortunate enough to still be doing well, that comfort and buffer we had has all but dissappeared in the pandemic.
Half decade sounds longer than 5 years. Someone could have started highschool, and by the end of highschool be in a completely different price market than before. 5 years is way too quick for these things to change that much.
Me who started driving in 2001 and then saw gas prices double before I was out of hs. Then the great recession happened when I finally got out on my own and gas was even more expensive than it is now and companies had started raising prices like crazy with the excuse that fuel prices were high. It's also when shrinkflation started happening. Good jobs were also unobtainable because people postponed retirement for years after the recession. I didn't get anything decent until around 10 years ago, and now I feel like I'm back where I was when I was 21 working at McDonald's.
I buy those dollar store packages of refried beans and rice, and cans of mixed vegetables. I put them in individual containers and freeze them to take to work for lunch. It's pretty cheap, and it makes me feel a lot fuller than anything I could buy at a convenience store or restaurant.
It's also vegan and gluten free (I have celiac and severe lactose intolerance)
A thing I have thought of trying is to take a bean and rice mixture and make stuffed peppers with it. I am certain it will be delicious. Certainly better than a ShitChicken.
This sounds really good too!
Also, whenever I cook something like soup or even pasta, I always cook extra so I can freeze it in portions. It's so much better than paying like $15 for fast food or junk food that's not even satisfying
I can also very much recommend lentins.
They are good. There's even pasta made out of lentins. It is gluten free. You use it like ordinary pasta. It's good.
Not even 15 minutes ago I was in a McDonald’s drive-thru. The only thing I ordered was a Single Cheeseburger, the cost was $3.59…. I told them never mind and came home and made pasta instead. Absolutely ridiculous that a single patty burger from there could cost so much.
Of course, it's cheaper to cook at home. But the McChicken is, like the whole industry that is to blame for it's existance, a serious threat to our physical health and thus to be avoided at any cost.
And they can get away with it because your average voter only cares about whatever culture war nonsense Fox tells them to be angry about
"Idc about cost of living nonsense when there's migrants caravans at the boarder and kids are being transed!!!!!!!!"
The thing that gets me, is that since 2018, I can confidently say that my wage has not even nearly tripled... It's barely even ~40% higher, and I've been on a fairly steady upward path, but the fucking McChicken has increased by almost triple.
I could not give fewer shits about the numerical prices. It's the relative price that annoys me. A trip to McDonald's (or realistically, anywhere) is that much more of a percentage of my paycheque.
And the icing on this shit-filled cake is that productivity has been on a steady incline the entire time. So we're doing more work, for the same wages, and prices continue to inflate.
Where is it all going? (Isn't it obvious)
They're exploiting the fact that they've turned humanity into creepy, hopelessly dependent little goblins and it's horrific to watch.
Kind of hate posts like this. Yes! Inflation is happening and bad. And yes! The McChicken (and a lot of fast food value options) have soared in price in recent years. But trying to take that and frame it as “look at this… it’s so obvious the government is lying to us and overall inflation is actually over 100%” Is just ignorant nonsense and it tends to play into conspiratorial minds who don’t actually have any experience in economics or data collection.
You can hate the federal government all you want. Really. I totally get it. But they are unfortunately really good at data collection.
Inflation for necessities like food and housing is ridiculous and exceeding 100% over three years.
Inflation for rich luxuries have barely gone up comparatively.
But all the reports are averaged.
So since the rich are doing so fabulous that their numbers make it look like no one is struggling.
Nevermind the fact that 60% of people live paycheck to paycheck.
I love burgers but I don't get to have them anymore from anywhere because costs skyrocketed and my income didn't. McDonald's even stopped being affordable a while ago. In Canada the price of a McDouble, at least last time I checked near me, was $4. For a McDouble.
I just eat ramen and dream of burgers.
$1 in January of 2018 has the same buying power as...$1.24 in December of 2023. "The price of everything" did not increased 100%, it increased 24%.
That also sucks, and you don't have to lie about it to make your point.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=201801&year2=202312
Tell that to all of us paying upwards of 3X as much for many basic goods, including McChickens.
BuT tHe EcOnOmY iS bOoMiNg!
On average the economy is doing good but people don't live in averages, especially if the average is skewed by billionaires.
In school we learned that when the economy "booms" or is at its current high point, everyone, excluding very rich people, are doing worse. Most of humanity (like 95%) are better off when the economy is doing poorly, as goods tend to get cheaper. Just something I wanted to share.
I used to love getting the dollar menu stuff from McDonald’s and idk if it’s that I turned 30 and suddenly started feeling grumpy about everything but I refuse to go there now that their prices are like this for a “value menu”.
Not only has the price of the McDonalds hash brown increased, the size portion has decreased.
This seems like a bad example, there is a good video by modern MBA on taco bells value menu that mentions McDonald's losing money with the dollar menu
