Curious who these people are that stay awake at night worrying about immigration. I think about it all the time but lament that immigration isn’t higher. The US needs to reform immigration policy and let more people in IMHO.
That’s a common sentiment, but I think it undermines American egalitarianism, and, ultimately, our notion of self-governance. When your class of “burger flippers” is also foreign, that can’t help but accentuate class differences.
Burgers should cost what’s needed to pay an American with deep roots in the country to flip the burgers. I think it would be morally beneficial for people if the employees flipping burgers or serving them at restaurants were their neighbors’ kids.
If you let everyone in, then the service jobs will be done by a class of foreigners, where language, religion, and cultural barriers with the native population accentuate class barriers. You see this in most coastal cities today.
We’ve been able to see that for the entire history of this country, as successive waves of immigrants have settled in this country. It’s how America works.
What you’re talking about is a 20th century phenomenon. Immigrants in the 19th century came and established their own communities, rather than becoming a class of service workers. The trend you’re talking about started with 20th century immigration to cities.
That later immigration trend coincided with the decline of American self government. Instead of establishing self-governing communities like German and Scottish immigrants, the Italians and Irish that came to America as a service class were co-opted into machine and ethnic-bloc politics.
People in the south. A huge population of unskilled and undocumented immigrants is not good for a community. There are only so many under the table jobs
The things you like about America are a product of the culture of Americans. My parents, from Bangladesh, are deeply different from my wife’s parents, who came to America before the Revolutionary War. If my ancestors had built America it would look very different than what it looks like today.
If you think America is pretty good—and I do, my family left our homeland to come here—it seems reasonable to worry that the cultural changes wrought by immigration could mess up a good thing.
In the UK and AU immigration is a major political issue - turning back the boats and a wide range of dog whistles do wonders for the conservative parties.
As pragmatic issues of policy it has been the case that spinning these up as political issues costs magnitudes more in real money (white elephant solutions pulling in expensive private contractors et al) and human suffering (drawn out processing, seperation of families, etc).
Always a big issue as elections draw closer.
Rarely as much of an actual issue as is made out to be on the stumps.
The large influx of south Asians to the UK will make the UK different. And if you think the UK is a better place than India, those changes will probably not be great ones from your point of view.
He is basically the same age as his likely opponent and unlike him can string together a coherent sentence so I’m not sure that will be a big deal in the end.
Yeah I think polling reflects that Republicans constantly talk about this and the media just can't help saying "many are saying". Just today on PBS Newshour they let Chris Sununu talk, unchallenged and uninterrupted, for over a minute about how Democrats just stop him in the street to talk about how old Biden is, which is an obviously made-up story that doesn't pass the smell test.
Not in my experience. At that point it is really just how well someone lived and not much about the specific age. I find Biden to be much more coherent than trump and he also appears to be significantly more physically active. Hell he bikes more than I do.
I am upper middle class. A friend of mine, who is wealthier than I, were talking about being able to afford groceries. Not organic groceries, not special local grass fed beef or anything silly like that. A family of four is paying about 1k a month in groceries to eat "reasonably" well. In that I am including things like dog food and detergent, but still this is a ridiculous number.
Inflation, on paper, might be okay, but each week I find myself curtailing our grocery selection more and more, simply to maintain the budget at status quo.
Inflation may be slowing, but it's still bad, and it is much worse for many more people than it is for me.
I’m not sure what to make of this, but my 2012 weekly grocery budget for a family of two was $200. I can’t imagine trying to feed a family of four on $250 each week.
My friends based in Singapore, roughly same criteria and food living standard as you described, about 2K sgd a month or 1.5K usd after exchange rate. This doesnt factor in car, housing, schooling, recreation, utility, and medical. And food are to some extend subsidized or indirectly price controlled by government (through market intervention by state-based companies). You had it better at 1K usd. At least, you can move to somewhere rural midwest and have your own farm. To do the same in Singapore, he will have to be multi-millionaire owning multi millions USD small plot the equivalent of a poor family home land area in suburb in 2nd or 3rd tier city in America. I am sure someone similar in NY or San Fra will be even worst. Again, at least they can run to somewhere cheap.
It’s wild what Singaporeans spend on food. Many people don’t prepare meals regularly at home. Kitchens are small and super basic.
It’s pretty common to eat out for most meals. The plethora of options and low cost is obviously a big driver, but it’s getting hard to find meals for under $5 now.
So 150 meals a month times $5 is $750 for food. And that’s eating super cheap. The more hearty hawker meals are more like $6-8.
Of course not everyone eats every meal out and there are people that cook at home a lot (seems to be more common with Malay), but when this 25 year old colleague making $5,000 per month told me they spend $1,000 per month on meals I was surprised.
When I was in the Bay Area our family of 4 spent $600 per month on food (all prepared at home). That was shopping at Costco and Asians markets and not really counting dollars while doing it.
No idea why this is downvoted as it’s 100% true. Grocery prices have gone bonkers to the point I’ve asked my wife to really look at prices on certain things after coming home with a $10 loaf of bread.
Even Costco - I’d fill a cart for $350-$400 and now it’s $600-$650. Things feel like they’ve stabilized but costs are extremely high. Something broke.
I can fill a cart pretty full up with a mix of staples, frozen food and some snacks for ~$250-300 at costco, I'm guessing you're getting lobster tails, expensive wine and other pricey items.
“Net sales for the 17-week fourth quarter were $77.43 billion, an increase of 9.4 percent from $70.76 billion in the 16-week fourth quarter last year. Net sales for the 53-week fiscal year were $237.71 billion, an increase of 6.7 percent from $222.73 billion in the 52-week fiscal year of 2022.”
I have 2 kids under 4 so we still need diapers and wipes and our grocery costs feel insane... we regularly spend $1200 to $1600 or more per month in California.
People are pretty ignorant of costs. One of my coworkers bitches about this, but uses instacart for alot of shopping and buys dopey shit like pre-cut carrots.
The pandemic taught retailers that they can increase margins and people are too lazy to shop. I bought a container of strawberries for about half the cost of the local supermarket chain at Aldi. Beef is about 30% less at warehouse clubs.
Those price differences are just margin, and people tag on more with delivery services, and blame the economy for their own stupidity.
If all of the grocery stores collude to raise the price of milk, that’s inflation. It doesn’t matter if it was because of input costs or a desire to expand margins.
The popularity of Instacart has not grown enough to account for inflation. That’s just grasping at straws to blame people and bury your head in the sand.
I never use delivery services and my grocery prices have gone up 50%. There is more money chasing fewer goods. It’s simple supply and demand.
Only idiots get hung up arguing if middlemen are to blame for price increases. If supply was adequate, it wouldn’t be possible for grocery stores to raise prices.
I’m super skeptical on these numbers as me and my partner are nowhere near $250 a month per person and don’t do any budgeting or restrictions when we are at the expensive grocery stores in our town.
Here's another then: I'm one person with no pets who has spent an average of $430 per month at the grocery store in 2023. And almost all of that is food, I get most non-food consumables from Amazon subscriptions.
In 2019 it was around $250 per month. Pretty much the same set of items.
So prices went up and you didn’t change what you get? I guess people are much less price elastic than I am. We are well under $200 a month and I don’t feel like we do anything special to keep our costs down.
I usually don't add to these conversations because my salary is high enough I don't need to pay attention and people love jumping on that. But I think here it ends up with a good comparison point.
We also make a high enough income where we don’t really think much at all about grocery prices but have no issue spending way below $200 a month without thinking about it. This is why I am confused by these stories. Sure I grab the thing on sale instead of the expensive thing when I notice but it doesn’t seem that hard to stay under $200 a person.
How are you defining groceries here? I suspect that some people are being fairly expansive and including everything that they'd buy at a grocery store, while others are being much more restrictive. Using a more expansive definition (mostly because I've literally broken things down by items), we're close to $500 per person, the few times I've spot-checked our spending. I think it's difficult to be well-below $200 per person without being highly budget-conscious, avoiding expensive categories altogether and/or eating out all the time.
I am really trying to avoid commenting on HN but your math makes little sense.
Even 10-15 years ago, $5/meal was more than reasonable to eat well. For a just a 2 adult household, that is $15/day and $450/mo. What I was paying eating cheap fastfood and making ~10/hr pre-2015 was twice that. Just last year, trying to live strictly off of delivery apps like doordash and ubereats as a single person I could barely crack 1200/mo.
1k/mo is 12000/yr. 2k/mo rent for a 3 bedroom is 24k/yr. Being able to pay groceries and rent on $36k/yr only for that isn't so bad.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to ruin anyone's plans to live a better life, but when someone says "the economy is great", that's relative to post-covid and two multi-decade wars the US fought and a global recession not even two decades old.
I almost want to beg and plead people to realize the amazingly prosperous times they live in. The great depression and grear famines were not so long ago. The dust bowl can still come back. Multiple wars at the same time at a global scale is still a very much impending realistic possibility. Another war in th middle east is brewing. A dictator wanna be is being nominated in the US for president. Appreciate what you have so you can fight to keep it!
Things can get much better but also much worse. We must be sober minded in fighting for a better future without forgetting what we have. There has never been a more prosperous time and place to be alive in the history of mankind than now in America, especially when you consider the marvels of medicine and technology available today.
Again, things could be much better on many fronts, but what good is that fight if what little you enjoy now is gone?
Things like being most prosperous and powerful country and the center of tech and medicine don't tend to come back once they are gone for a country if you look at history.
Maybe we need to celebrate thanksgiving more than once a year?
> when someone says "the economy is great", that's relative to post-covid and two multi-decade wars the US fought and a global recession not even two decades old.
No? It's relative to pretty much all of 20th/21st century data. Can you point to some numbers that you think tell a different story? We are vastly wealthier than our grandparents. Real[1] median household income is 50% higher today than in the 80's. See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
It's down a little (like 5%) across the pandemic, which is what everyone seems to be freaking out about. But that correction is behind us now and things are looking good again, which is causing a somewhat counter-intuitive anti-anti-freakout a-la your comment. Which is what the linked article is about.
Cheer up, basically. You've been fooled by the discourse into believing things that aren't true.
> In fact, this is also a period when the number of two-income households shrunk, from 35% in 1987 to 32% in 2020. During this time period, overall household income increased by 18.5% (inflation-adjusted with the CPI-U-RS). For households with just one earner, income increased by almost the exact same amount (19.1%). Income of two-earner households did increase even more (37.7%), so seeing the full distribution would be very useful.
The way to address "not knowing anything about the numbers" is to actually look up some numbers and not just pontificate incorrectly. Real median personal income shows essentially an identical curve: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
I haven't pontificated, I asked a question, and I really didn't want or cared enough about the topic to do a search, so I asked the question in case somebody already knew
Firstly you -really- don't want deflation. That'll kill an economy real quick.
Second, we get deflation of specific goods all the time. Electronics and solar equipment are the poster child for this. An Apple 2 cost a lot more than my most recent machine.
Thirdly, wages rise to compensate with inflation. Ask your grandfather what their first car cost. Then ask them about their first salary check.
I get that people get antsy when they see prices go up. I get that a combination of increased demand and constrained supply both work to increase specific things (housing in SF). I get that your employer may not be increasing wages to match inflation.
I get that people on fixed income pensions feel inflation a lot. (Let their pain be your education; don't use fixed income products as your retirement plan.)
But equally don't use a word like "damage" here. There's no damage. The price of goods is always in flux, and always the result of many different interlocking numbers.
I understand that to folks who have grown up in zero-inflation environment that this can seem scary. But, from one who has lived my whole life in a single-digit inflation environment, its not scary. You just get/give a wage bump each year to compensate.
And yeah, I get that US employers are profit hungry and less inclined to pay living wages. If you're starting a business I heartily suggest you build inflation into your wage bill .
> Firstly you -really- don't want deflation. That'll kill an economy real quick.
Everyone repeats that as mantra but I think that should be challenged.
I find it doubtful that inflation is needed to encourage spending or investment. Currency inflates naturally (that is, loses value) because it is not inherently useful, and things you can exchange for it are more useful today than they are tomorrow.
You won't skip buying a burger today to buy two burgers next year if you're going to starve. And even for luxuries, they are worth more today than next year, because lifespans are limited.
I don’t know what you’re desperately trying to defend here. Groceries are a big basket of foods and household supplies. When the price of this category goes up faster than wages it hurts low and middle class people. This isn’t some optional good like travel.
> But equally don't use a word like "damage" here. There's no damage.
You come across as an out of touch loon when you say something like that right after shitting on people who have fixed incomes.
Inflation is damage to the value of the currency and that impacts everyone.
> A family of four is paying about 1k a month in groceries to eat "reasonably" well.
How much exactly should a family of four pay to eat "reasonably" well, in your estimation. That number comes to about 17% of median household income. Is 17% too much to pay for food? What's the right number?
It sounds glib, but it's a serious question. What you've done here is cherry pick a specific expense that rose faster than inflation, and tried to draw a global conclusion directly through that outlier! I mean, what if you and your upper middle class friend were talking about flat panel TV prices? Would you have concluded the economy was great?
Indeed, I misread; corrected. The same question pertains though. Is that too much for food? It doesn't seem like too much for food. People don't really spend that much on groceries relative to other expenses.
To be clear: I was picking another outlier. In fact most american households spend rather more on personal electronics and gadgetry (not just TVs, obviously) than they do on food. Yet no one is dancing in the streets about the amazing windfall of cheap Foxconn-produced devices, because we all recognize that one market is an outlier and that the economy as a whole doesn't look that great.
I'm just pointing out that freaking out about food prices is the same kind of cherry picking.
I think a lot of people buy into their “class” according to their income and so they’re no more financially secure than those making less with smaller debt obligations.
A number of my peers have homes worth 2-5x mine and they’re really struggling. Which just feels bizarre given they’re making very good money.
> We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy
I do think the economy is doing fairly well, but the question is more one of sustainability in my opinion. We're seeing dwindling personal savings levels [1] and the housing market is the least affordable it's been probably on record.
The argument I've seen is that people are spending down their savings, which is of course translating into healthy economic data - but once those savings are gone, things may not look so good.
Personally, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem cut and dried.
[edit] Note that inflation numbers are improving but still well above target and in past instances, this last bit has been hard to shake. Higher for longer and no real new supply of housing means that's not going to change any time soon.
Isn't this exactly the doomslinging the upthread commenter was complaining about? You conceded that in aggregate the economy is "doing fairly well", and then list a bunch of nitpicky reasons for you to believe the opposite. I mean, a mild drop in personal savings rate since the pandemic[1] and inflation that is higher than the last decade but just barely above its long term average don't really seem that concerning to me.
Economies are cyclic and there will always be doom in the future. But there's no good justfication for predicting any particular doom. You're reaching, basically.
[1] Conveniently ignoring the huge boom during the pandemic due to assistance programs.
I don’t think GP’s post is particularly doomery. I’m talking about people who think the statistics are all fake or wrong, but who believe sensational social media posts about hyperinflation and recession
The personal savings rate graph you link is basically in the same spot as it was in 2004, so I don't think it's fair to call "dwindling" there a recent trend. The giant spike in 2020 is the outlier on that chart and there continue to be a lot of reverberations of 2020, but a story of "people saved a lot of money during COVID and the combination of that + logistics disruptions led to price spikes in various areas" is fairly straightforward and doesn't have to suggest unsustainability.
> In addition to high prices, Americans continue to grapple with an impenetrable housing market, persistent income inequality, and rising debt, prompting some to think that the so-called “American Dream” is broken.
I think the main reason for this is that improvements implemented after the subprime mortgage crisis worked too well - in that, now, every buyer is guaranteed to be able to afford the monthly payment for their home. The crash in home values only happened because the market was flooded with foreclosures in a very short period of time, and that isn't happening now.
Although maybe people can only make their mortgage by putting more of their spending on revolving credit[0].
I know many people who've gotten big raises over the last 2-3 years, including individuals who have more than doubled their pay. And they always attribute their raises to hard work, job hopping, or climbing the promotion ladder. At the same time, they'll also act like the 20% or whatever inflation we've had over the past few years is equivalent to the government stealing their hard earned money.
From a macro perspective, the same factors that drove inflation is what drove their big pay hikes. But most people only see that "I earned more money and now I'm being screwed by inflation". These are often the people who spend like crazy while simultaneously complaining about how bad the economy is!
88 comments
[ 336 ms ] story [ 2851 ms ] threadBurgers should cost what’s needed to pay an American with deep roots in the country to flip the burgers. I think it would be morally beneficial for people if the employees flipping burgers or serving them at restaurants were their neighbors’ kids.
Yes, exactly—that’s why we should let everyone in.
We’ve been able to see that for the entire history of this country, as successive waves of immigrants have settled in this country. It’s how America works.
That later immigration trend coincided with the decline of American self government. Instead of establishing self-governing communities like German and Scottish immigrants, the Italians and Irish that came to America as a service class were co-opted into machine and ethnic-bloc politics.
If you think America is pretty good—and I do, my family left our homeland to come here—it seems reasonable to worry that the cultural changes wrought by immigration could mess up a good thing.
As pragmatic issues of policy it has been the case that spinning these up as political issues costs magnitudes more in real money (white elephant solutions pulling in expensive private contractors et al) and human suffering (drawn out processing, seperation of families, etc).
Always a big issue as elections draw closer.
Rarely as much of an actual issue as is made out to be on the stumps.
The large influx of south Asians to the UK will make the UK different. And if you think the UK is a better place than India, those changes will probably not be great ones from your point of view.
Inflation, on paper, might be okay, but each week I find myself curtailing our grocery selection more and more, simply to maintain the budget at status quo.
Inflation may be slowing, but it's still bad, and it is much worse for many more people than it is for me.
It’s pretty common to eat out for most meals. The plethora of options and low cost is obviously a big driver, but it’s getting hard to find meals for under $5 now.
So 150 meals a month times $5 is $750 for food. And that’s eating super cheap. The more hearty hawker meals are more like $6-8.
Of course not everyone eats every meal out and there are people that cook at home a lot (seems to be more common with Malay), but when this 25 year old colleague making $5,000 per month told me they spend $1,000 per month on meals I was surprised.
When I was in the Bay Area our family of 4 spent $600 per month on food (all prepared at home). That was shopping at Costco and Asians markets and not really counting dollars while doing it.
Even Costco - I’d fill a cart for $350-$400 and now it’s $600-$650. Things feel like they’ve stabilized but costs are extremely high. Something broke.
This anti-capitalism has got to stop.
The pandemic taught retailers that they can increase margins and people are too lazy to shop. I bought a container of strawberries for about half the cost of the local supermarket chain at Aldi. Beef is about 30% less at warehouse clubs.
Those price differences are just margin, and people tag on more with delivery services, and blame the economy for their own stupidity.
If you pay someone to fetch and deliver a commodity, that’s not commodity inflation.
The popularity of Instacart has not grown enough to account for inflation. That’s just grasping at straws to blame people and bury your head in the sand.
I never use delivery services and my grocery prices have gone up 50%. There is more money chasing fewer goods. It’s simple supply and demand.
Only idiots get hung up arguing if middlemen are to blame for price increases. If supply was adequate, it wouldn’t be possible for grocery stores to raise prices.
In 2019 it was around $250 per month. Pretty much the same set of items.
(This is in Chicago)
Even 10-15 years ago, $5/meal was more than reasonable to eat well. For a just a 2 adult household, that is $15/day and $450/mo. What I was paying eating cheap fastfood and making ~10/hr pre-2015 was twice that. Just last year, trying to live strictly off of delivery apps like doordash and ubereats as a single person I could barely crack 1200/mo.
1k/mo is 12000/yr. 2k/mo rent for a 3 bedroom is 24k/yr. Being able to pay groceries and rent on $36k/yr only for that isn't so bad.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to ruin anyone's plans to live a better life, but when someone says "the economy is great", that's relative to post-covid and two multi-decade wars the US fought and a global recession not even two decades old.
I almost want to beg and plead people to realize the amazingly prosperous times they live in. The great depression and grear famines were not so long ago. The dust bowl can still come back. Multiple wars at the same time at a global scale is still a very much impending realistic possibility. Another war in th middle east is brewing. A dictator wanna be is being nominated in the US for president. Appreciate what you have so you can fight to keep it!
Things can get much better but also much worse. We must be sober minded in fighting for a better future without forgetting what we have. There has never been a more prosperous time and place to be alive in the history of mankind than now in America, especially when you consider the marvels of medicine and technology available today.
Again, things could be much better on many fronts, but what good is that fight if what little you enjoy now is gone?
Things like being most prosperous and powerful country and the center of tech and medicine don't tend to come back once they are gone for a country if you look at history.
Maybe we need to celebrate thanksgiving more than once a year?
No? It's relative to pretty much all of 20th/21st century data. Can you point to some numbers that you think tell a different story? We are vastly wealthier than our grandparents. Real[1] median household income is 50% higher today than in the 80's. See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
It's down a little (like 5%) across the pandemic, which is what everyone seems to be freaking out about. But that correction is behind us now and things are looking good again, which is causing a somewhat counter-intuitive anti-anti-freakout a-la your comment. Which is what the linked article is about.
Cheer up, basically. You've been fooled by the discourse into believing things that aren't true.
[1] Where "real" means "inflation-adjusted"
https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/06/22/us-household...
> In fact, this is also a period when the number of two-income households shrunk, from 35% in 1987 to 32% in 2020. During this time period, overall household income increased by 18.5% (inflation-adjusted with the CPI-U-RS). For households with just one earner, income increased by almost the exact same amount (19.1%). Income of two-earner households did increase even more (37.7%), so seeing the full distribution would be very useful.
Second, we get deflation of specific goods all the time. Electronics and solar equipment are the poster child for this. An Apple 2 cost a lot more than my most recent machine.
Thirdly, wages rise to compensate with inflation. Ask your grandfather what their first car cost. Then ask them about their first salary check.
I get that people get antsy when they see prices go up. I get that a combination of increased demand and constrained supply both work to increase specific things (housing in SF). I get that your employer may not be increasing wages to match inflation.
I get that people on fixed income pensions feel inflation a lot. (Let their pain be your education; don't use fixed income products as your retirement plan.)
But equally don't use a word like "damage" here. There's no damage. The price of goods is always in flux, and always the result of many different interlocking numbers.
I understand that to folks who have grown up in zero-inflation environment that this can seem scary. But, from one who has lived my whole life in a single-digit inflation environment, its not scary. You just get/give a wage bump each year to compensate.
And yeah, I get that US employers are profit hungry and less inclined to pay living wages. If you're starting a business I heartily suggest you build inflation into your wage bill .
Everyone repeats that as mantra but I think that should be challenged.
I find it doubtful that inflation is needed to encourage spending or investment. Currency inflates naturally (that is, loses value) because it is not inherently useful, and things you can exchange for it are more useful today than they are tomorrow.
You won't skip buying a burger today to buy two burgers next year if you're going to starve. And even for luxuries, they are worth more today than next year, because lifespans are limited.
> But equally don't use a word like "damage" here. There's no damage.
You come across as an out of touch loon when you say something like that right after shitting on people who have fixed incomes.
Inflation is damage to the value of the currency and that impacts everyone.
How much exactly should a family of four pay to eat "reasonably" well, in your estimation. That number comes to about 17% of median household income. Is 17% too much to pay for food? What's the right number?
It sounds glib, but it's a serious question. What you've done here is cherry pick a specific expense that rose faster than inflation, and tried to draw a global conclusion directly through that outlier! I mean, what if you and your upper middle class friend were talking about flat panel TV prices? Would you have concluded the economy was great?
Maybe if you buy a flat panel tv every month, you’d think it was?
I'm just pointing out that freaking out about food prices is the same kind of cherry picking.
Where did you learn that? It doesn’t seem very likely.
A number of my peers have homes worth 2-5x mine and they’re really struggling. Which just feels bizarre given they’re making very good money.
LOL
You must think I'm pretty dumb, CNN.
The argument I've seen is that people are spending down their savings, which is of course translating into healthy economic data - but once those savings are gone, things may not look so good.
Personally, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem cut and dried.
[edit] Note that inflation numbers are improving but still well above target and in past instances, this last bit has been hard to shake. Higher for longer and no real new supply of housing means that's not going to change any time soon.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
Economies are cyclic and there will always be doom in the future. But there's no good justfication for predicting any particular doom. You're reaching, basically.
[1] Conveniently ignoring the huge boom during the pandemic due to assistance programs.
I think the main reason for this is that improvements implemented after the subprime mortgage crisis worked too well - in that, now, every buyer is guaranteed to be able to afford the monthly payment for their home. The crash in home values only happened because the market was flooded with foreclosures in a very short period of time, and that isn't happening now.
Although maybe people can only make their mortgage by putting more of their spending on revolving credit[0].
0: https://abcnews.go.com/US/credit-card-users-avoid-mounting-d...
From a macro perspective, the same factors that drove inflation is what drove their big pay hikes. But most people only see that "I earned more money and now I'm being screwed by inflation". These are often the people who spend like crazy while simultaneously complaining about how bad the economy is!