[rchaud]

The future is gloomy because the American economy has largely been in a state of "jobless recovery" since thr great recession. Stock prices are up thanks to corporate tax cuts, ZIRP, AI hype etc, but discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure.

[JumpCrisscross]

> discretionary income is either stagnant in many sectors or are being chipped away from every angle: rent, healthcare, transport, childcare or leisure

This is false.

Real disposable personal income is higher today than any time before March 2020 [1]. Covid stimulus first dramatically raised (March '20 to '21) and then lowered (March '21 to June '22) that figure. But we hit a local maximum in April '25, after which real DPI started falling, though nevertheless only to the level we saw in spring '21 and early '25, and no point before.

(Real median household figures are more laggy. But they show the same trend [2]. On a national level, these figures are up.)

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

[Moomoomoo309]

If you see how real disposable personal income is defined, it basically just says how much personal income in total there is - if 90% of it was in the hands of 1% of the people, it does not tell you that. It does not tell you a median either - it's just how big the pool is. Household incomes are up, but is that inflation adjusted, and how does that compare to cost of living? The conclusion you are coming to is not supported by the data you provided alone.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Household incomes are up, but is that inflation adjusted

Yes. That’s what the “real” part communicates in economics data.

> how does that compare to cost of living? The conclusion you are coming to is not supported by the data you provided alone

If aggregate real personal disposable incomes are up, and real median household incomes are up, for real median household disposable incomes to be down requires an extreme increase in lower income households’ costs of living compared with higher incomes households’. (No, rising wealth wouldn’t fix that disparity because we’re measuring income and consumption, the former which exempts capital gains.)

Inflation effects are unevenly spread across households [1]. But the slope of the effect, at least as of ‘21, was insufficient to shift the median negative. What it probably was sufficient to do, especially by 2024, is shift somewhere between the lower decile to maybe quartile’s real disposable household income negative since ~2025 to 2018, when we last moderated interest rates. But not since the GFC.

TL; DR While OP’s statement is true of some households, and probably most households in the lower decile to quarter, it’s not true in general. (Caveat: it may be true if we include recent Medicaid and poverty-related cuts.)

[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

[rchaud]

Disposable income is income after taxes. Discretionary income, which is what I specified, is income that remains after the necessities of life have been paid for.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Discretionary income, which is what I specified, is income that remains after the necessities of life have been paid for

You’re correct. See the personal savings rate [1]. If we observe the distribution, the lower quartile to third of households have no material savings [2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

[WillPostForFood]

Discretionary income spiked during Covid giveaways, and declined during the inflation of 2021/2, but the trend line is up from 2015.

https://i.imgur.com/Dbf8yyU.png

[Esophagus4]

Speaking to your point about a jobless recovery… that’s not accurate.

The US had recovered to full pre-recession employment levels by 2017[1].

Unemployment is around 4% right now.

I can’t speak to discretionary income or why the market is high, and maybe there is some sort of structural “underemployment” going on, but people are working.

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/chart-book-the-legacy-of-the-g...

[rchaud]

Uber and Doordash count as "jobs" in the employment rolls. That's fine for people like you and me who probably have full time jobs with benefits and look at employment numbers from the angle of "how does this affect the value of my index fund?" But for the people who have these jobs as their sole source of income and rely on forms of public assistance to make ends, the reality feels far more precarious.