▪️They’re resurrecting this false meme from last year, when the “10 year challenge” meme was popular. I’ll post the original bust below, but I’ll note the current Redfin estimate is $383K, which has gone up since last year, but still way below $550k (also the meme cites 2022).
▪️This meme currently has over 340K likes on Twitter & has been widely shared elsewhere. It presents this house like it was sold for these prices in 2012 & 2022, but is actually complete fiction, like someone just picked a random picture of a house and fabricated a price.
▪️This particular house was hard to find, reverse image searches brought up just a few sites, where this house was used as a generic example of modern American ranch-style architecture. Like here:
https://architecturestyles.org/post-war-modern/
▪️I nearly gave up, but in a caption one site mentioned it was in Des Peres, near St. Louis, MO. If you look closely at the original photo, you can see “eleven hundred and nine” written above the garage.
▪️It was a long shot without the street, but I tried a search for “Des Peres 1109 ranch style home” and bam, it came up on Trulia!
https://www.trulia.com/p/mo/saint-louis/1109-cameo-ct-saint-louis-mo-63131--2060091681
▪️It’s 3 bd 2 ba, 1478 sq ft. It was last sold in Aug 2008 for $220K. According to Redfin it’s estimated at $322K, Trulia & Zillow put it at $337K ($290-385K range) and it was assessed for property taxes at $296,400 in 2020.
https://www.redfin.com/MO/Des-Peres/1109-Cameo-Ct-63131/home/93514369
▪️I don’t know what is was worth in 2012, as it wasn’t for sale then, but in 14 years it went from ~$220K-330K. If it went up exactly with price inflation it would be $280K, so it certainly exceeded that, but not the more than 3X in 10 years that this meme suggests.
▪️Meanwhile, average hourly earnings were $21.70/hr in Aug 2008, $23.24/hr in 2012 and $31.31/hr today. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out no one earns the Federal min wage. Just 0.8% of full-time workers earn at or below it, and most of those are in leisure & hospitality that get tips in addition. It makes no sense to use it as a metric for any price, especially home prices.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm
▪️To pre-empt the objections that this meme still makes a valid point housing has gone up, ok. But these numbers are pure fiction, they don’t accurately represent the change in this house, the median US price, median St. Louis price, nothing. Why not find an actual 10 yr home price instead of making it up? I guess the answer is because you can get 340K likes, so who cares?
▪️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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