[izacus]

Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong.

It was utterly bizzare seeing the podcasters and media just gaslight everyone that disagreed with "US is doing great" narrative.

[pavlov]

All the metrics (except AI-related stock prices) are worse today than a year ago.

Does the media acknowledge that? The leading cable channel and broadcast TV stations are Republican-controlled, so now they pretend “US is doing great.”

[izacus]

I'm talking about couple of years ago, in the leadup to elections.

[pavlov]

The election was less than 12 months ago. I know, feels like a lifetime already.

[myvoiceismypass]

> I'm talking about couple of years ago, in the leadup to elections.

You mean November 2024? It has not even been a full single year, never mind "a couple"

[beardyw]

Yeah, that wrong makes this wrong right.

[paulryanrogers]

My recollection is the left leaning media was saying that inflation was finally slowing back down. And implicitly that we may have to accept that prices won't ever return to pre-COVID levels.

Oh and bird flu can do a number on egg prices.

[fabian2k]

Not going to defend the messaging here, they really didn't do a good job. But the US was doing better than most western countries and inflation was getting lower.

Problem is, the inflation that already happened was still there. And that part is what people notice immediately.

But right now, a part of what is happening is that Trump has been blowing up parts of the economy with his tarrifs and erratic actions. The effect of that is still happening and likely will get worse.

[throwaway48476]

Over the last 30 years the most inflated spending category is education and healthcare, which are arguably the least import dependent.

[ThunderSizzle]

And housing... which also isn't import dependent, necessarily.

[acdha]

Both depend heavily on immigrants, however, both for staffing and in the case of education for the students paying full-price tuition and effectively subsidizing everyone else.

[throwaway48476]

Immigration has only made it more expensive, as shown by the increase in both price and immigration.

[acdha]

That’s far from clear. For example, healthcare costs have risen sharply but you’d need to demonstrate that hiring foreign workers contributed to that rather than simply being a reaction to the unsustainable costs.

Similarly, in education if it was just a few prestige schools it’d be easy to believe that Harvard and Yale were hiking their base rates to exploit international students while finding credits for some of the others, but the trend is across the board even at less prestigious state schools and I’d want to see data that it’s not better explained by other factors like schools maximizing revenue from student aid.

[throwaway48476]

Wherever there has been mass migration huge inflation has followed. If reverse migration was implemented inflation would lessen and quality of life would dramatically improve.

[izacus]

Yes, that's exactly the gaslighting I'm talking about :)

[acdha]

> Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong.

This sounds like something you were told by right-wing social media. It certainly isn’t what you’d have thought from the extensive discussion of that in the mainstream media or during the campaign when the candidates were talking about real problems affecting millions of people.

The closest you’d come to being factual were the pieces correctly noting that the U.S. economy was doing better than many other countries at recovering from the pandemic but that’s another way of saying “less bad”.

[myvoiceismypass]

We were trending in a good direction then. We are trending in a very very bad direction now.