BLS data shows real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages has gone up since the pandemic.
The average household income is 80k(ish) the average house is 420k(ish)
In Bethlehem, PA (a fairly middle of the road place tax wise) that means $5050 take home pay a month and a mortgage payment (FHA 3.5 down, 6.7 interest) of $2650 a month. That is more than half your pay just on a mortgage, not pmi, not insurance, not utilities, not anything else. Do this calculation across the country with localized numbers, do it with rent instead. Add a car and insurance for it into the mix. Then try adding in health insurance, groceries, etc. You are going to find that the numbers result in average people being squeezed and guess what? That lines up with peoples actual experience.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paycheck-to-paycheck-definition...
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2024/amid-a-resilient...
My interpretation of this is that pay has not kept up with inflation.
Edited to be less witty
The overall situation of housing and college costs have been increasing for a while this last round of inflation really was a big part of the last straw.
Source? Is this simply because rural counties are doing worse than urbanized counties, and there are more rural counties than urbanized counties, such that if you don't account for population you'll come to the conclusion that "vast majority of the counties had wages falling behind inflation", even though that's not true for the country as a whole?
[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEDLISPRIPERSQUFEEUS
If you think things aren't good enough for an average person in one of the statistically best periods a capitalist economy has ever seen, there are redistributive alternatives. That doesn't seem to be what Trump voters are expecting. Instead there seems to be a nostalgia for past better times, which isn't really explained by "people are squeezed" based on math that would almost certainly have worked out just as tightly ten years ago.
Something else is going on. I don't claim to have a full explanation but none of the attempts to "fix" BLS statistics that I've seen have been more persuasive than this.
That might be so, but it's better than people's vibes, which famously flip-flops based on whether their preferred party is in power.
>that may not apply for every individual or subpopulation
I never claimed that, but the parent comment did imply real wages have not gone up "for most people".
Also, the median stats say nothing about how people below it are doing. By definition, that is 50%, and that is also about the number of people voting for Trump, alongside your run-of-the-mill racists and fascists.
Everyone likes to point this out like it somehow made up for all the wage stagnation of the last 40 years and it most definitely did not.
Not to mention these wage gains are slowing fast.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff....
The gap might be real, but it's existed for decades. Moreover at least when it comes to explaining why people voted for Trump: while I have no data to support it, "we're poorer because of inflation" is a much more popular sentiment/election issue than "the top 1% are taking the gains for themselves", especially among republican voters.
They deserved it because they worked hard for it!
Please be more specific if you are explaining why American voters have got angry and done something stupid that will make things worse or if you are defending that stupidity as a good thing that will help the situation you are talking about.
This makes their own lives, in which they are still better off than 99.9% of the history of humanity, feel worse.
Where's the evidence this is happening for a majority (or even something vaguely resembling one) of people? I've already posted official statistics that show inflation adjusted median wages are up.
The most recent wage gains failed to make up for this fact
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff...
If wage gains kept pace with productivity gains it’d be a very different and vastly better economic story for the average American
It stagnated in 2008-2016 but they still voted for obama, but when it finally started rising in 2016 they voted for trump?
If wages increased with productivity increases we'd be in better shape overall as a society, but here we are.
You can’t argue about feelings
https://sciencenotes.org/what-would-happen-if-the-earth-stop...
Edit: Without the snark, lots of people believe their rent, grocery bills, energy bills etc. have gone up a lot more than official inflation numbers (and that can be true even if the inflation numbers are “accurate” for some definition of accurate), and you’re not going to convince them using anything derived from these inflation numbers.