The Economy Is Great. Why Are Americans in Such a Rotten Mood?

[Sympthsical]

16. Because inflation stuck and housing sucks

Yes, the rate of inflation came down, but the price increases that came during the year long spike have stayed.

Inflation coming down doesn't mean prices come down along with it. Middle and lower incomes feel these pinches. As of September, 62% of Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck. When you're scraping, any living expense increase shows up in your life, be that food, rent, insurance, etc.

What can help create optimism is prospects. If you're a Millennial, for example, you're around late 20s to early 40s, maybe hoping to get your own home some day. Welp, that's not happening any time soon. So continue to enjoy renting. Oh, and that's going to increase, too. So now it's even harder to save for that house you're never going to get.

It creates a pessimism that feeds into itself. You have to give people hope for the future, and a lot of people simply don't feel that with current conditions. Statistics do not defeat lived experience when it comes to how people feel. And people do not like being told they're not experiencing or feeling what they feel. I see messaging like, "The economy's great! You're hallucinating all this!"

That's . . . not a message that is going to work. I don't know why people think it is.

We need to tackle the housing crisis, and we need to figure out a way so that NIMBYism when it comes to building new housing doesn't factor in. Part of the problem is the local politicians are held hostage by the assholes among us, so they never want to approve new housing. We need to, perhaps, take it out of local hands to some degree. We need to immunize somewhat the people implementing housing development from the screaming of my asshole neighbors.

The current approach isn't working.