Wages are not increasing nearly enough, and the plentiful jobs are coming with pointless conditions like return to office even when WFH was working out great.
There are some obvious answers as to why Americans are so disgruntled. Everything is super expensive. The pandemic hangover is persistent — long covid isn’t just physical, it’s emotional. The government supports doled out in recent years — expanded unemployment insurance, the student loan pause, the child tax credit — have expired. The country’s political system is not exactly working spectacularly, not to mention the sense of dread heading into the 2024 elections.
This article gives more reasons for American’s grumpiness in regards to the economy than just a “vibes,” though I still think that is a major part of the the problem.
I think a big part of the problem is that people don’t understand inflation, especially after a decade of fairly low inflation; they keep expecting prices to go back to where they were a couple years ago, not realizing that is simply not going to happen.
This is then compounded by high interest rates, student loan payments resuming, and of course the 2024 election cycle (which will definitely be totally normal and uneventful /s.)
I was using “people” in a general sense; the simple reality is average voter is not that informed on economic and political issues.
The link below shows that wage growth since the pandemic began has mostly been a wash; there was significant wage growth at the start of the pandemic before inflation exploded. Wages have actually outgrown inflation since about February 2023. Link: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/
I am not sure if you are American or not, but this link (https://www.bls.gov/charts/county-employment-and-wages/percent-change-aww-by-state.htm) shows the breakdown by state from March 2022 to March 2023. Of note is that states with an already high cost of living like New York only had a 2.1% wage growth, whereas low cost of living states like Florida had 9.3% wage growth. Why this is, I cannot exactly say but I think it does demonstrate how the wage growth across the country has been somewhat uneven.
It may be helpful context, and in real life the context of who is using them and why does matter with offensive words.
But people on anonymous internet discussion boards (like the person who reported your comment) have no way of verifying the identity and the intention of the people who post here. So it's cleaner, fairer and easier to moderate fairly if we have simple rules against using offensive language. I would take the same approach if someone posted a racial slur but asserted it was okay because they were part of that ethnic group, for example.
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