Tell these Americans that the economy is humming, that median wage growth has nudged ahead of the core inflation rate, and that everything’s grand, and you’re likely to see a roll of the eyes.

  • charles@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Not sure how to break this to you, but Biden was not elected in March 2020. He wasn’t even president in 2020. The last 3 years isn’t the last 4 years, which isn’t the last 5 years.

    My point is if Powell wants to compare dates in good faith, he would make them consistent and reflect on that. “Groceries are up X% in the last 2 years but gas is down Y% during that same time. Maybe people find groceries more compelling than gas.” These are the types of things that legitimate economists and journalists do. Powell is not. He instead cherry picks smatterings of years to make the big numbers and incredulously claim that “smug liberals can’t look at the data.” But they are, and that’s why they’re baffled. He is just looking to dunk on “liberal elites”.

    Really shitty discourse to accuse someone of not reading the article when I’m literally quoting it, but do you.

    • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      He’s not cherry picking random dates, he just using different dates to compare different data. If he had compared the gas prices from 2020 to 2022 in order to make the increase of prices seem higher than it was, that would be bad faith, but he didn’t do that. If he had compared the increase of food prices between 2022 and 2024 while ignoring a large drop in food prices between 2020 and 2022, that would bad faith, but that didn’t happen.

      Bad faith is pretending that comparing the gas and food prices and randomly speculating on how they make Americans feel is something, “legitimate economists,” do. Bad faith is saying that, “[Biden] wasn’t even president in 2020,” as though the state of the economy just before he took office isn’t relevant to this conversation. Bad faith is pretending I said you never read the article when I clearly said you didn’t read the article before you started criticizing it. But hey, you do you.