Fox cable hosts are doing the job of the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, by admitting that the economy under President Biden is strong. Bernstein joins MSNBC’s Ali Velshi to discuss the latest “expectation-busting” jobs report.
This is such horseshit.
There have been a quarter million layoffs at tech companies at every level for the last year or so.
My own 10+ year stint as a contract worker for one of these companies ended in December.
I got another position before January but the pay is significantly less and it’s only for the next half year probably.
I am 10 years closer to retirement but haven’t had a full time position anywhere since 2012 because companies get to abuse laws to pretend I’m not an employee so I have to pay more of the share in federal taxes and they can fire me without paying unemployment, retirement, or give severance.
I still have student debt that I’ve paid on since then, and the cost of living is higher than ever.
Paying for medical bills is worse every year, and insurance finds new ways to avoid paying anything while taking THOUSANDS out of our family finances every month.
I am tired of having no real choice but to either support a fucking fascist, or a 1980s Republican.
I fucking hate everyone across the internet who told me Sanders was “uNeLeCtAbLe.”
The neoliberal wing of the only somewhat sane party have paved the way yet again for a demagogue to screw the entire world over by allowing them to disingenuously assign blame related to inaction at addressing material and tangible issues that are solvable by the Democratic Party on marginalized people as scapegoats.
All we had to do was elect the guy who said “maybe let’s tax the billionaires a bit more and we can then have healthcare, maybe some better consumer protections, and I don’t know - a couple of bullet trains between our biggest cities.”
But no. We had to get the guy who plagiarized his speeches in his las run, and whom Obama selected as his VP to appease racist moderates in the late 2000s.
Yes but have you considered that the rich are getting richer and therefore the economy is great? Doesn’t matter that us normal folks can’t afford groceries as long as stocks go up.
Just a fyi…we don’t need to take the rich more, we can literally pay for single payer now. This is what kills me, we already spend 3xs as much in healthcare than any other single payer system out there. We’re more than capable of providing that yesterday if we wanted to, but the insurance companies would shit a brick if we told them to pound sand.
Pro-tip: Tech isn’t the whole economy. Over-indexing on that one sector–and SV tech companies in particular–is incredibly myopic.
LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK!
The stock market is held aloft pretty much solely because of tech.
I’ll be honest, I don’t understand your point.
What does the value of those company’s stocks (which it’s worth noting are rallying in response to those layoffs) have to do with my point that the underlying causes of the layoffs in tech cannot be extrapolated to the broader economy, and thus action in that sector should not be used as a proxy for overall economic health?
So much emphasis is placed on the stock market and yet the stock market is boosted to all-time highs thanks to a handful of tech companies. In fact, these handful of tech companies make up about 25% of the entire S&P 500 (not even counting the many other tech companies on the S&P 500 that aren’t part of this handful). With how much the stock market is talked about as evidence that the economy is doing great, tech plays an oversized role. So if tech companies are being temporarily boosted by layoffs, what do you think comes after? The AI hype cycle will hit a slump and tech stocks will eat shit, as will the broad stock market because tech makes up so much of it. Then suddenly “the economy” ain’t doing so great.
A lot of great speculation that has absolutely nothing to do with how the economy is doing right now, which is what I thought we were talking about.
Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough: the stock market is correlated with economic health but does not measure it directly. In the first half of 2023 the stock market was erratic due to rising interest rates while the real economy–measured by unemployment rates, salaries, etc–was quite healthy. Conversely, the post-2008 recovery was anemic at best for the non-rich while the stock market rallied to all time highs. There’s a reason I’ve never once mentioned the stock market while making the case that the economy is healthy.
Put another way: your predicted future slump in tech stocks does not therefore mean the economy more broadly will suffer.
And that’s assuming your prediction plays out, and that remains to be seen. After all, I’ll bet you were predicting that Facebook is on the decline, and yet they announced a truly astonishing quarter.
And again, none of this is relevant to the state of the economy right now.