im pretty sure it made it worse for 100% just not catastrophically worse for the 35% not included. EDITED - keeping my original comment for posterity but someone else had a better comment and really there are some who made more than inflation. Not a whole lot but some.
Incomes grew healthily in 2023, but so did spending, the Fed report showed. Monthly budgets remained tight and more than half of adults didn’t have money left over after paying their expenses.
This was especially true for lower-income adults, who reported higher instances of not having enough to eat, not being able to cover bills in full and skipping medical care.
Good thing this country cares about its citizens :/
Honestly I set out to make again the point about “asking people how they feel like things are going isn’t actually a good way to measure economics, especially when 50% of them (you know the ones) are programmed by the news they consume to be in a state of constant frothing panic about inflation, crime, and immigrants” - but I looked at the report itself and its charts and I actually really like them. They seem like they ask enough very specific things to get down to brass tacks of how people are doing on a month to month survival level in a way that seems like it’s exactly one of the key things that the Fed should be tracking. So yeah fair play.
Idk if I would have led off with all the worst possible things you can find - like take a report that says, 72% of adults say they’re doing okay or better financially, and find the highest statistic that you can find that can be paired up with something bad, and then put that in the headline instead - but the actual report seems really good.
You'll find that happens a lot around here. There's a startling amount of myopic reflexiveness in the Lemmy crowd, and they don't like a disagreement with the doom loop, even if it's presented respectfully.
Did you not see the 6% drop in adults that are doing ok financially in the last 2 years?
And yeah asking how people are doing is a bit meh but when they can tell you that people aren't able to afford to see a doctor or dentist in the last couple years that is a much bigger show of a problem.
Yeah, 2022 was a shit show. That’s when all the Covid inflation hit, that ate up the gains in wages at the top of the scale and then some. The fact that even with that having happened, wages at the bottom have been beating inflation by quite a bit, is a damn miracle. But yeah I’m a little surprised it went down by only 6% in 2022.
Health care is a good one yeah - the number of uninsured people has been dropping steadily the last few years, to where now it’s lower than it’s ever been. Enrollment in ACA-sponsored plans shot up when Biden started unfucking some of the things that the Republicans had done to try to kill it. Idk how health care spending looks, but there’s like 20 million people who have health care now who didn’t before, I know.
good point. I made a commnet about it effecting everyone but there likely is the segment whos income actually has been outpacing inflation for the last 3 years.
Here's the thing. I'm better off than i was last year. And the year before and the year before that. With that said, 2023-2024 was less of an improvement than any of the last 5 years or so because of cost of living. So am i better off than last year? Sure. An i concerned that's only gonna last another year or so? Very.
There will be people in here who will downvote and explain how my anecdotal experience/sample size of 1 does not invalidate all the "research" and at the same time expect you to invalidate your entire situation because the research says blah blah blah.
yeah I guess the question is are you typical. I have been losing since 20222. It was sorta end of 2021 but its the start of 2024 now so about 2 years. Mostly I have been steady since 2013. No real significant growth but no loss. There is an outlier with 2020 as I was let go with decent severance for covid but then actually found a new job in my field pretty quick and then we had the covid stimulus. So that was one of my best years ever overall. Oh also before I was let go I ironically had a lot of overtime (yes I had an enviable hourly full time tech job so got overtime but also a severance going out). That is really an outlier though. I started my current career track after moving into tech in 2000 so had a lot of growth between 2000 and 2012 as I established myself in the field. Now a good amount of effects are personal and unique to me. I would trade post 20000 though with two more 90's economy decades but I would trade them all for the horrible 70's if it meant our use of plastic was minimal and we still had decent regulation and taxes.
