homelessness on the rise

True (to a really shocking and unusual degree)

people living paycheck-to-paycheck on the rise

? Where is this from

Looks to me like adults who have 3 months of emergency savings was 55% in 2020, is now 54%

cost of living increasing faster than income growth

Not true in the average, and especially notably not true for the bottom end of wage earners. It’s highly unusual but even under some pretty punishing inflation the bottom end of wage earners are making more.

Every time I say this there is at least one person who gets very upset and says more or less, how dare you show me numbers when I’m hurting, don’t you understand that me hurting cancels out the numbers? And I’m not sure how to respond to that

I think maybe it’s largely invisible to Lemmy users (who I’m gonna assume overlap heavily with tech job people) because for top wage earners and especially in tech jobs it actually is true – but for the most vulnerable people, they’re making way more than they were, comfortably outpacing even a very high level of inflation. I think most people who do manufacturing or drive a truck are not on Lemmy at this stage, when those are most of the people who have been gaining from the way the labor market’s been changing.

corporations doubling prices for no reason other than they realized they can, thus resulting in record profits for huge companies

Absolutely true, and real fucked up. It cancels out a lot of the growth in wages that would otherwise have just been money that people got to keep which they pretty fucking badly needed.

Oh right, that’s what it means.

Big businesses are making more money.

The Poors don’t factor into such things, so their problems aren’t real economic problems.

The article I linked was pretty focused on things that do work this way (recession / shrinking vs growing). Those metrics are a bunch of crap. But if you look at the more meaningful metrics, they’re actually getting surprisingly better also. (Although, it’s still shit, yes. A few years of progress doesn’t erase decades of continuous steady collapse. I’m just talking about how it’s been changing.)

There’s an interesting little thing that happens with this: If you ask people how the US economy is, they say it’s shit. If you ask how their state is doing, they say it’s beating the average by quite a bit. There are a few different ways to interpret that, but one is that their picture of the country is formed by news, and their picture of their state is formed by experience, and their experience doesn’t match the news.