This is incredible. They are touting the automatic COLA increases, which have been around since 1975 from a law passed by Congress, as a Biden achievement! Biden had nothing to do with it, nor does he dole out anything, all it means is that inflation was the highest in 40 yrs 😂
▪️Annual COLAs are tied to the CPI-W index (urban wage & clerical workers) which is slightly different from the CPI-U (urban consumers), the headline number most people refer to. Increasing SS payments means that SS will just become insolvent quicker, it’s not a good thing!
https://www.ssa.gov/cola/
▪️On a related note, the CPI data for Sept came out yesterday and was again higher than expected. The CPI-U rose 0.4% in Sept, +8.2% year over year (YoY) which was a slight decline from last month, but there are lots of troubling signs that inflation will remain high.
▪️The last 2 months have been cooled mostly by steep declines in energy prices, and also used cars. But it’s doubtful energy will continue falling in the coming months, meanwhile price inflation in the broader economy has taken root.
▪️In the beginning of the inflation crisis, the shelter component helped tamp down the inflation numbers. Shelter is almost 1/3 of the CPI and was growing at ~2-5% for most of the past year, which helped the headline number stay at “just” 7-9%. But shelter is now rising.
▪️In Sept, shelter rose 0.7% and 6.6% YoY, the highest in 40 yrs. This also propelled the core index (excluding food & energy) to a 40 yr high. Shelter is a much stickier index and won’t likely come down quickly, meaning elevated CPI readings will probably continue.
▪️Food also remains high, +0.8% in Sept (11.2% YoY). Food away from home rose the most in 41 years! If energy increases again in the coming months we could see CPI actually go up and reach new highs, something few are expecting but would have giant repercussions.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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