I'm surprised there's not an inflation thread yet
POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, June 11, 2026 17:04
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How credit card debt has become a burden for Americans — and Joe Biden
https://www.ft.com/content/34c57911-dcda-4c29-b75d-bef830608a5a?segmen
tId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9
Are you reading this, Krugman?
You fucking idiot.
Quote:
US consumers paid almost 50 per cent more in credit card expenses last year than in 2020, the year before President Joe Biden took office, putting pressure on family budgets and firing up an election issue about what Republicans say is a cost of living crisis.
Credit card interest and fees increased by $51bn in that time to $157bn, according to data provided by US banks to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Delinquencies on credit card loans are also running at their highest level in almost 13 years, according to data from Moody’s Analytics, even as banks have reported record profits from credit card lending.
The rise in credit card costs has come as the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates to a 23-year high but lenders have pushed consumer borrowing rates higher still. The central bank, which meets on Wednesday, is not expected to begin cutting rates until this summer.
The Central Bank already met. They did not lower the rates today.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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New York Times: One Quarter of Renters Now Pay 50% of Their Income On Rent
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/politics/biden-housing-costs.htm
l
Quote:
A quarter of tenants — about 12 million households — now spend more than half their income on rent. Prices are so high that if a minimum-wage employee worked 45 hours a week for a month, a median rent would consume every dollar he or she made.
Here's a breakdown of minimum wage by state:
https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/state-minimum-wages
There's a lot of states with a $7.25 minimum wage that matches the Federal minimum wage that hasn't seen an increase since 2009 when Obama just started his first term... 15 years ago this July.
According to Redfin, average apartment rent in Indiana in January of 2023 was $850 per month. It's currently $1,147 per month.
https://www.redfin.com/state/Indiana/rental-market
If you worked 45 hours per week at $7.25, your gross take home pay is $1,305. Your gross pay for the year will be $16,965.
That's not the full story though. If you grossed $16,965 for the year, your half of the Social Security / Medicare contributions are $1,298 per year.
Social Security: $2,104 + Medicare: $492 = $2,956 / (2) Employer Contribution: $1,298.
The Standard Deduction for Federal taxes in 2023 was $13,850. You subtract the SS/Medicare tax before the Standard Deduction is applied ($16,965 - $1,298 = $15,667), so you had a taxable gross of ($15,667 - $13,850 =) $1,817. A 10% Federal tax is applied to this, so that's another $182 deducted from your take home pay.
$16,965 - $1,298 - $182 = $15,485
The average State/Local income tax rate in Indiana is 5% on everything over $1,000. This is taken before you pay the Federal taxes, so $15,667 - $1,000 = $14,667. 5% of $14,667 = $733.
$16,965 - $1,298 - $182 - $773 = $14,712.
You also get an earned income credit there too, which can vary based off of your circumstances and filing status. Let's just call it a single person with no other sources of income like rental properties or bank interest. The number you'd look up on the table is $15,667, which in 2023 equates to an EIC credit of $150.
Actual take home pay: $14,712 + $150 = $14,862
Your monthly take home pay for working 45 hours per week at the national minimum wage is $1,238.50 per month.
In January of 2023 with the average Indiana rent costing $850 per month, you were spending 68.6% of your income on rent.
In March of 2024 with the average Indiana rent costing $1,147 per month, you are spending 92.6% of your income on rent.
Good thing you qualify for the maximum $239 per month in food stamp benefits, because that 7.4% you were left with after paying rent is just barely enough to pay sales taxes on anything you buy, including electricity and heat.
You'll also qualify for LIHEAP for help with heat/electricity costs every winter, but I doubt very much that apartment renters qualify for the maximum $475 benefit. It's probably more in the $250-$300 range, even though there isn't a state law requiring landlords to pay for your heat like they have in Illinois and Wisconsin.
Hope you have a lot of credit cards on hand that aren't maxed out.
They will be.
Good luck!
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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America’s Magical Thinking About Housing
The city of Austin built a lot of homes. Now rent is falling, and some people seem to think that’s a bad thing.
By Derek Thompson | March 21, 2024
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/austin-texas-rents-f
alling-housing/677819/
If you want to understand America’s strange relationship with housing in the 21st century, look at Austin, where no matter what happens to prices, someone’s always claiming that the sky is falling.
In the 2010s, the capital of Texas grew faster than any other major U.S. metro, pulling in movers from around the country. Initially, downtown and suburban areas struggled to build enough apartments and single-family homes to meet the influx of demand, and housing costs bloomed across the region. Since the beginning of the pandemic, even as rent inflation has gone berserk nationwide, no city has experienced anything like Austin’s growth in housing costs. In 2021, rents rose at the most furious annual rate in the city’s history. In 2022, rent growth exceeded every other large city in the country, as Austin’s median rent nearly doubled.
This might sound like the beginning of a familiar and depressing story—one that Americans have gotten used to over the past few decades, especially if they live in a coastal blue state. California and New York, anchored by “superstar” clusters in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street, have pulled in some of the nation’s most creative workers, who have pushed price levels up. But a combination of stifling construction regulations, eternal permitting processes, legal tools to block new development, and NIMBY neighbors restricted the addition of more housing units. Rent and ownership costs rose in America’s richest cities, until families started giving up and moving out. As the economics writer Noah Smith has argued, California and New York are practically driving people out of the state “by refusing to build enough housing."
But Austin—and Texas more generally—has defied the narrative that skyrocketing housing costs are a problem from hell that people just have to accept. In response to rent increases, the Texas capital experimented with the uncommon strategy of actually building enough homes for people to live in. This year, Austin is expected to add more apartment units as a share of its existing inventory than any other city in the country. Again as a share of existing inventory, Austin is adding homes more than twice as fast as the national average and nearly nine times faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. (You read that right: nine times faster.)
The results are spectacular for renters and buyers. The surge in housing supply, alongside declining inbound domestic migration, has led to falling rents and home prices across the city. Austin rents have come down 7 percent in the past year.
One could celebrate this report as a win for movers. Or, if you’re The Wall Street Journal, you could treat the news as a seriously frightening development.
“Once America’s Hottest Housing Market, Austin Is Running in Reverse,” announced the headline of the top story on the WSJ website on Monday. The article illustrated “Austin’s recent downswing” and its “glut of luxury apartment buildings” with photographs of abandoned downtown plazas, as if the fastest-growing city of the 2010s had been suddenly hollowed out by a plague and left to zombies and tumbleweeds.
Running in reverse. Downswing. Glut. This is the same Wall Street Journal that, in 2021, noted that rent inflation was demolishing American budgets and, in 2022, gawked at all-time-high rents in places like New York City. Sure, falling housing costs are an annoyance if you’re trying to sell your place in the next quarter, or if you’re a developer operating on the razor’s edge of profitability. But this outlook seems to set up a no-win situation. If rising rent prices are bad, but falling rent prices are also bad, what exactly are we supposed to root for in the U.S. housing market?
This is a surprisingly complex questio
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
America’s Magical Thinking About Housing
It's a good article.
Quote:
Housing is a pit of oxymoronic thinking. The Wall Street Journal tells its readers that it’s bad when rents go up but also bad when rents go down. The Democratic Party platform says homes have to be affordable and also that they ought to appreciate faster than the rate of inflation. Americans in research surveys say that if grain yields surge, grain prices go down, but that if housing construction surges, housing costs go up.
I’m listing these examples not to be despondent about the prospects for housing abundance, but rather to be realistic. Housing is, in fact, both a present need and a future investment. In a dual-side marketplace, I suppose you could argue that any change in price is bad for some party. But the externalities of housing abundance outweigh the loss to any particular party rooting to profit from scarcity. More and denser housing has been found to reduce inequality and raise personal income; to increase individual exercise rates and reduce obesity; to limit carbon emissions and preserve thousands of acres of natural splendor; and even to increase productivity and innovation.
The miracle of Austin is helpful to recognize, because it restores clarity to a simple truth: Houses are essential, but they are not magical. The normal rules of supply and demand apply. Perhaps more blue cities and states should make a point of applying those rules—and build more damn homes.
Nearly everybody's view on housing is warped in current year.
Back before the housing crash of 2008 or 2009 or 2012 or whatever year the article you look at says that it happened now, I started working a great job in 2005. I was told by a few people who worked there before I did that renting an apartment at the time was throwing money away and I should be buying a house as an investment.
Not only did this discount any previous experiences of layoffs and the very real possibility that there would be another one in the future (spoiler alert: There was in late 2009) and the fact that if I didn't have that job I didn't want to be stuck living in a Milwaukee suburb that was an hour and a half away from my friends and family, but up until the recent housing boom phenomena driven in large part by No Money Down infomercials and speculation the value of people's homes across the country with rare exceptions kept pace with inflation.
THAT is what we should be striving for in the housing market. 100% absolute parity with inflation.
But... But... But... REAL ESTATE IS AN INVESTMENT!!!! I hear you scream.
Yeah. It is.
But not in the "my house is going to be worth 3 times the price and I can use it as an ATM" way that you're thinking.
Obviously, it's an investment with immediate returns if you bought it and you're renting it out to somebody else. And you can rent it in that area enough to pay the much higher property taxes on rental properties and you're putting all of that extra money back in the mortgage and building your equity in the hopes of owning it outright one day.
It's also an investment if you spend your life buying a run-down home every 2 to 5 years, fixing it up and flipping it for a much higher price after you've made tons of improvements. As long as you did it in an area where it made sense to put that much time and money into it and you'd get the asking price you need to make a profit... also waiting long enough in between sales to be able to sell without getting raped by a 20% Capital Gains tax.
There is also an "investment" when you buy your own home. It's not about the money you make on the property when you sell it. As I said before, that should more or less be a wash because of the inflation that happened while you were living there except for any seriously notable improvements you've made to the home and the land before you sell it.
But now, when you sell it, you don't
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Yes, food is more expensive. And wages are higher too.
April 4, 2024 – 10:47 am
https://jabberwocking.com/yes-food-is-more-expensive-and-wages-are-hig
her-too/
I have perfect timing. Yesterday I noted that even though overall food inflation is low, there are still some items that have increased a lot. Today, the Wall Street Journal splashes this exact thing across their front page:
"Calm down, Kevin," some of you are already saying. "Read past the headline and I'm sure they compare average food prices to wages. The Journal is a serious paper."
Astonishingly enough, no. There is not so much as a mention of wages in the piece. In fact, they exaggerate food inflation by cherry picking a basket of items that have gone up more than average. Here's the real story:
Since 2019, the overall cost of groceries has increased 1.5% more than average wages.
That's not a typo. 1.5%.
That's all but unnoticeable. And, I suppose, nowhere near scary enough for the front page of the Journal. They should be ashamed of themselves.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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More lies by Kevin Drum.
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Quote:
Originally posted:
Quote:Interesting chart.
Since 2019, the overall cost of groceries has increased 1.5% more than average wages.
Tied (pinned) at beginning of 2019.
By beginning of 2021 (end of Trumponomics), wages had gain more than 5% over inflation. In only 2 years, tail end of Trump.
By beginning of 2023, not only had Bidenflation reversed this trajectory, but had also made Bidenflation gain 10% more than wages. In only his first 2 years of destroying the economy.
Every once in a while, Libtards accidentally stumble across the truth - and then forget to hide it.
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I used to buy 1 liter bottles of Mountain Dew at Dollar Tree - for $1.
Then Bidenflation, so it was a Biden Buck, or $1.25 for the same bottle.
Now the same bottle, at Dollar Tree, is $1.75.
also:
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/99-cents-only-stores-closing-151055629.html
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Yeah. Bidenomics killed the last Dollar store.
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Percent change from year ago
Blue Line: Average Weekly Earnings of All Employees, Total Private
Red Line: Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items Less Food and Energy in U.S. City Average
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jDnO
To win in November 2020, Trump injected $trillions into the economy for more than a year, causing incomes to rise and bank accounts to fill, which caused sellers to raise their prices and move all that extra money from the buyers into sellers' bank accounts. (It is a fact little understood, but sellers raise their prices to learn how much money buyers have in their bank accounts. Once sellers have gotten all the buyers' money, as indicated by buyers decreasing their purchases, prices stop rising faster than incomes.)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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