this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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It takes a simple google search to show how bad those statistics are being collected today in the US. Both Trump administrations actively attacked funding and reporting of these statistics which hastened their existing decay. The powerful have a lot to gain from stats coming off sunnier than reality. Plus it doesn't account for cost of living expenses or how income is distributed very well at all. It's a blunt instrument that does little to show how the bottom half of American wage workers are actually struggling. I'm glad you seem to be doing well enough to defend this system, but most of the people I know are barely getting by and have nothing for retirement. If you look at generational wealth, the majority of younger Americans have far less wealth than our parents or grandparents did at our age. Fewer own houses or have the stability of a large savings account for emergencies. The costs of essentials like food, housing/rent, insurance (health/property,etc), and just about everything has gone up at a much higher clip than wages. The trends are going downward and it is a direct result of billionaires influence through "charitable foundation" spending and dark money. Read the book "Dark Money" by Jane Mayer and "The Network State" and other plans by the ultra rich to take more money and power from the majority and government assistance. Any gains regular people have made have come from collective action and technology inevitably creating some surplus, not trickle down from the rich. With climate change causing further disasters as insurance companies raise rates and deny coverage - it will only exasperate the issues. Not to mention the inevitable climate refugees that will be created. Trends may have improved at a macro level from industrialization over the last half a millennia, but the last 50 years have not been kind to poorer Americans.
Most of that data was collected outside of Trump's terms, either under Biden or Obama, and the trend is consistent.
It uses "real" dollars, which accounts for inflation. So yes, it does.
Income distribution is irrelevant here, I'm looking at median incomes rising over time, relative to inflation. Musk or Bezos making billions doesn't skew these numbers since they're not mean numbers (average).
I could probably dig up some stats that break it down by income percentile, but I'm worried you'll just reject it because it doesn't fit your worldview. If you provide some evidence to back up your claims (not just income gap, that's well known, but that people are becoming worse off), I'll go dig through the data and see what I can find. But "things are actually getting better" don't make headlines, so there's a lot of rage bait to dig through.
Anecdotes aren't statistics.
If you go back 50 years, people still didn't save enough for retirement. Pensions largely filled in the gap there, but a lot of people still fell through the cracks. That's largely not an income problem and more a priorities problem. Show me someone who doesn't have enough for retirement and I can show you someone with a similar income who did. Even people with huge incomes often live paycheck to paycheck.
Obviously individual circumstances differ, but individual circumstances don't define trends.
Do you have sources to back any of this up?
That certainly happens, but stories like this are mostly rage bait.
Do you think companies suddenly got greedy recently? They've always been greedy, and have been screwing people over since time immemorial.
The reason things get more expensive isn't because some capitalist decided to suddenly become more greedy, it's because of supply and demand.
Things shot up in price during COVID for a number of reasons:
Yet people blame "those greedy capitalists" when really it's consumer behavior largely driving up prices.
When the cause of higher prices is resolved, prices tend to return to normal. For example:
I don't know what you mean by "trickle down from the rich," but things like technological change is funded by the rich. Reagan was certainly an idiot here, my point is merely that things get better partially because of investments by the rich. That generally doesn't mean you make more money, but that you get more for your money (e.g. everyone seems to have smartphones now vs almost nobody 20 years ago).
This doesn't seem related, not sure why you bring it up. If anything, it'll create jobs since we'll need people to build dikes, rebuild coastal homes, etc, at the cost of reduced GDP since it's not actually productive work.
Afaik, no time is kind to poorer people. But I firmly believe poorer people are better off today than they were 50 years ago.