That makes sense, but not very relevant to my point. To a working class person, the big three items in their budget are food, energy and housing. Therefore to them, core inflation being X% implies that at some point they’ll look at the items in their budget and find that they inflated X%. It doesn’t, however, say anything about their present state, which is that everything is expensive as hell. The core issue here is that “at some point” isn’t “now”. The DNC missed that distinction in their campaigning strategy, and bragged about their (sort of real, to be fair) accomplishments rather than doing damage control.

Yeah. This is completely true. The Democrats pulled off some genuinely impressive economic things, among them controlling inflation, but then they fucked up any chance that the messaging would hit by talking about how they "brought inflation back down." To an economist, that's true: Things used to cost 7% more every year, and now they cost 3% more every year. That's not how any normal person looks at "inflation" though. To the average person, inflation has "gone back down" once eggs and meat go back to what they used to cost.

I think if Biden had done half as much about climate change, and half as much for working-class wages, and gone after grocery stores to get them to stop price-gouging (like actually threatened the hell out of them with the federal governments' lawyers Bernie Sanders-style and made a big stink about how he was doing it), he would have won the election. He and his team did do a bunch of really important things for working people in this country. But they also just don't understand how the average person looks at it, apparently, or how to communicate effectively about what they did.

I sort of wish the news media would do its job, and bridge that gap instead of actively working to make people's misunderstandings of the world worse, but that seems unlikely to change. Especially now. I was extremely creeped out to realize that a lot of the statistics about this stuff, and news stories I remember reading about it, are much harder to find on Google now, and I wonder if that is on purpose. I think it might be.

You’re using 2019-2023 wage growth with 2021-2025 inflation, so this comparison is meaningless. Now I actually can’t find 2021-2025 (or 2021-2024 for that matter) wage growth numbers, but they’re probably not 30%.

Why do you assume they are not?

It looks to me like, if you look 2021-2024, 10th percentile wages went up by 25%. You can download the Excel sheet at https://www.bls.gov/ecec/factsheets/compensation-percentile-estimates.htm under "The complete set of estimates and relative standard errors are available in Excel.", from the very end. You want the second line "Civilian workers / Wages and Salaries." It went from $11.26 to $14.06 (current dollars), so 24.8% up.

If you look on https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ for inflation over the same period, it looks like 2021-2024 inflation was 15%. So they beat inflation by about 10% if you constrain the periods to be the same.