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I had leftover tacos for lunch...
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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Yeah if he thinks 70k is poor... Woah buddy
I'm not quite sure how to interpret this. Unless you're single in a low COL area, 70k in 2026 IS poor. Or, more accurately, it does not give someone everything that defined the post war "middle class" leaving you working poor or just old fashioned poor. The decision in the 90s to tell a technical-truth-lie about inflation to underreport it by 1-2% per year did wonders for juicing the economy, but now it's time to pay the piper so to speak. Median personal income in 2024 was $45k, but after 30 years (Rule of 70) of underreported inflation it should be almost twice that.
I’m curious: what do you mean by under reported inflation, and do you have any resources to read further?
https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/boskinrpt.html
TLDR version: In the 90s the owners realized that if you lie about inflation you could keep COLA down and pocket the difference. 1-2% a year seems like they're just skimming the top, but do that over decades and you've stolen HALF of incomes, which we are close to reaching. Poor numeracy skills, specifically not understanding exponential growth and the Rule of 69/70/72, has allowed this long con to be run on workers.
Further reading: The BLS uses a host of 'sounds reasonable' tools to adjust inflation that were introduced or reworked in the 90s. Hedonic adjustments, OER, substitutions, outlet substitutions, and chained CPI all seem reasonable from a certain angle (which of course is the one BLS presents you), but each one breaks down when confronted with the real world, how human being experience the economy, and time. They're tools that measure utility in a vacuum, not lifestyle or ripple effect or material reality. Hedonic adjustments is an extra special lie, because it's a microcosm of the current big economic lie- "yeah, everything is worse now than a few years ago, but look how big your TV/LLM is!"
Also read up on Labor Force Participation Rate, a seemingly reasonable measure which is used to keep unemployment numbers looking better.
"Lies, damn lies, and statistics" - Twain
Also the BLS just isn't even using actual data for something like 1/3 of the components of the CPI.
Budget cuts, DOGE, no staff to do the actual price surveys.
So, those hedonic adjustments?
At least 1/3 of the data points that go into those hedonic adjustments... well they are just generated by models that say 'what they should be'.
Look into 'imputation' in the actual reports if you want.
It just keeps getting worse, the more onion layers you peel back.
The other one that to me is just laughably stupid is how housing prices are estimated for the purposes of the CPI.
They basically just survey homeowners and ask them 'how much do you think your home fetch on the rental market?'
This is completely fucking insane imo.
Why not just actually ask people what the monthly total cost of owning their home is?
Oh its because well housing is an investment.
Except that if the monthly total cost of 'owning' the home exceeds the amount you think you could rent it out for, well, then you're basically underwater on a cost flow basis, because, you know, the cost of homeownership is... higher than its equivalent rent.
And if that condition persists... you will likely not be a homeowner for too much longer.
Yep, totally an 'investment'.
And if you counted actual ongoing homeownership costs, well, then you'd, you know, actually track ongoing homeownership costs, in the price index, that is ostensibly meant to measure ... ongoing costs.
It makes no fucking sense, other than as a way of depressing the housing component of the CPI when a housing market implosion is occuring, it assumes things we know are not historically true about the home and rental markets, when a bubble is popping.