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Full Employment Is Joe Biden’s True Legacy
(slate.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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politics
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The time during Bidens presidency has been fantastic for me and my family. Both my wife and I got huge pay raises, she then switched jobs for a much better hours and still making bank. We've been saving a lot of money and our investments have skyrocketed. Things are clearly more expensive, but I haven't had to worry about it too much. Also because I live in a fairly well off area, it appears everyone else is doing very well.
Because my personal situation has been so good, should I assume that this is true for everyone in our country? Or should I be smart and recognize that my personal experience is anecdotal and not representative of the whole economy? Should I blame the media too for reporting what's actually happening?
I’m glad things are going well for you, and I don’t mean this in any sarcastic way or anything.
I get my personal experience isn’t the average. I also get that, while a better representation, knowing the experiences that my friends and family are having isn’t the average.
My problem isn’t my experiences not matching the average. My issue is the metrics used by media are not a representation of average, and the pain of seeing these metrics show things are supposedly getting better where so many things around me are getting worse, at times in order to improve the metrics used by the media.
My issues are twofold:
I don’t think the metrics used by the media, ie the stock market, are wholly representative of whether or not things are going good for the average American. When things plummet, sure, I’d agree that’s a good metric, since companies will panic and then people will get screwed. But I don’t think markets doing well means things are doing well for the average American.
Sure, the line might be going up, that’s good for some people, but there are many reasons why that could be happening that have no impact, or even a negative impact on the average person. For example, a new technology could have been discovered that lets workers do double the work. A company that fires half their staff will now be making more profit, since they are paying less in wages, and therefore their stock values will rise. Half of their employees were sacrificed on the altar of the stock market for those gains. To use a more recent and frequent example of something that fucked me over: tech layoffs. Tech companies will often purge a lot of employees when doing things like preparing for an acquisition, or immediately following one. Sometimes, they will just thin out their staff following a completed project, or something similar. This often has a positive impact on stocks, but a dire impact on workers.
I also have an issue with the partisanship of the media and how the economy is presented to us differently based on who is in power and the bias of those, but that’s a whole new can of worms.
But things are getting better. This isn't to say we don't have a lot of catching up to do, because of the damage that inflation has done, but the overwhelming amount of the numbers make it pretty clear that we are going in the right direction.
This is not at all the metric we are using. You are specifically complaining about unemployment rate. Which is what this post is about. It's funny to bitch about the media being misleading, while complaining about the market not representing the average joe...when the number being discussed in the article is not the market and does represent something good for the average joe.