Interestingly, though, it's not economists with dismal conclusions now. It's people who are saying that we shouldn't look at evidence and just draw conclusions from our guts/media-based vibes who are pushing the idea that the sky is falling.
You made incorrect posts, and we're going in circles. I'm sorry, but there's no way you can spin away from the reality here.
It's crazy that you're saying that given the thread and the old one. In 2019, when the numbers were similar to now but not as good, you were ecstatic about the state of the economy, and I was (using the same metrics as now) arguing with leftists who were saying it's bad. The only reason you're now pushing gloom and doom over the economy is that you are a partisan hack.
The spike in total food costs seem to have brought you back to the levels of the early '90s. I was born in '93, so I remember what it was like in those times. Trillions of Americans were dying of hunger because of egg prices soaring, and inflation phantoms conjured by economists and Clinton were flaying the skin of trillions more, alive even. I can't believe we've been brought back to such a brutal time, and it's all Biden's fault.
Plus, it's driven more by people eating out!
Interest rates potentially have a huge impact on anything. The point of cranking the interest up is to cool the economy down, which is more indicative of things being good rather than bad. If you're concerned about the affordability of getting a place to live, supporting more housing being built would make the most direct sense. Your attempted point about any of this meaning the economy is in bad shape is unsupported.
The funny thing is that the WR was around in 2019, and no one was trying to come up with these convoluted ways to avoid the obvious conclusion that the economy was really good. It was just "GDP growth is good, unemployment is low, economy is great. Duh." And no one was saying that the strong demand was a result of low interest rates (which actually would have made more sense than Scheme's argument).
As many issues as I take with the economic analysis of @Jack V Savage this is just a desperate flailing attempt at an ad-hom. Jack really could not care less about tribalism and political team-sports. His analysis is always even across the board. If Trump takes power in 2025 and enacts a bunch of policies that data indicates is good for the economy, he will say as much. Trying to accuse him of being even more partisan than the frothing-at-the-mouth Trump cultists on this board is just completely unserious commentary.
I understand interest rates are increasing due to high inflation. Inflation still remains high today despite efforts to raise interest rates. That doesn't change the fact that real mortgage costs have gone up 33% since 2021, far outpacing real wages which have actually decreased since 2021. And yet the inflation metric only shows a 2% increase in cost of housing since 2021. Something doesn't add up and the resource I posted from the BEA explains that the OER makes assumptions of a low interest environment.
Yeah for sure. One of the dumbest things that I see people do is act like whoever is in charge is completely responsible for the state of the economy. As an example, Joe Biden has virtually nothing to do with the insane housing prices. It's a result of macroeconomic trends that have been happening for decades. But simpletons are gonna simpleton and will always reduce everything down to the dumbest takes possible.
I can tell you've never argued with him because all he does is ad-hominem attacks, constantly saying people are partisan hacks, how they are uneducated, etc. I quoted some in the very post you quoted. Go through his post history and CTRL+F the word 'partisan', because that's almost exclusively what he does. I did not launch insults of any kind previous to your quoted post, but I am done arguing with someone who just constantly launches insults and proclaims how right they are instead of actually addressing points. It's also exceedingly pathetic that he claims the victim the first time I return the favour after multiple posts of him doing the exact same thing. I hope you can at least agree with me there.
philes, secretly having lived as the opposite sex, being secret love children of dictators etc.
I was having the same argument in 2019, but with leftists, while Republican posters here agreed that the economy was doing really well.
He's not a partisan hack, though so that doesn't come up. But in this case, we have you in black and white agreeing in 2019 that the economy was good while insisting that it's bad in 2024. I've been consistent there (and generally, you can see I have actual positions that don't just change whenever the partisan narrative does).
It's more that you don't acknowledge it because you see everything through your own partisan lens.
You are using a one line sarcastic comment from 2019 to frame my entire argument. It's really sad. Why did you skip over my posts on inflation at the time? Or my critiques of Donald Trump and the right? It's because you're actually the partisan hack here. You're clinging onto a single joke I said 5 years ago because that's all you have.
I think you can get over it. It went further than that, too. You were arguing in more than just that thread about how good the economy was at the time.
Well, again, we have hard evidence of your hackery (the inconsistency of your position on the pre-pandemic economy and the current one) and hard evidence against me being a hack there. Do you have any examples of me doing what you've done (i.e., switching my position on an issue to line up with partisanship)? I would bet that you don't, and you're only making the accusation to kind of spread the guilt after you were busted.
I never switched my position though. The economy at the time was doing well. Then COVID hit and I had concerns over inflation and the money supply. Then as the money supply inflated, we had exceedingly high levels of inflation (which you were completely wrong about by the way) and interest rates were raised as a result.
Any metric that you were looking at to show that the economy was doing well during the early part of the Trump administration would show that it's doing better now. You weren't making silly attacks on the methodology of housing-cost calculations to try to disprove that the economy was as good as the headline numbers showed (and neither was I--I have been consistent over the years in using the same metrics to evaluate the same phenomena).
I really am sorry, but your criticisms of the PCE methodology are really off. I feel bad because it's an embarrassing mistake for you but you don't realize it. But getting into it requires explaining that to you from the bottom up, which is a whole thread's worth of stuff (I did link you to an explanation, which you didn't address). Your argument has been based on cherry-picking stuff. Like, I accurately pointed out that real wages are above any pre-pandemic level (and growing a lot over the past year), but you wanted to compare it to when unemployment was much higher during the pandemic, which skews the number upward (you even noticed that same effect when looking at an earlier recession--when a lot of people lose their jobs, median wages tend to rise a lot because of composition effects). You were really obsessed with prime-age LFP during the recovery from the GFC (in order to deny it), and now you're completely dismissive of it--again because it no longer serves your partisan narrative.
Prime-age LFP has barely moved the past 4 decades, it was higher during and after recessions and is a subset of total LFP which is almost 1 point lower. I'm not sure why you are dying on it's hill when it's shown to be increasingly poor at describing any economic situation in the past 40 years.
