Cost of Living in U.S. Has Risen 14% Over the Past 3 Years

Thank God that I don't own a cow in California.

Last Tuesday the low information voters in California passed Proposition 12 that requires that all cows, piggies and chickens live in a 5 STAR barn or chicken coup with air conditioning, heating, plumbing, king size beds and room service.

Californians are already paying almost a dollar more for a dozen eggs than the rest of the country because of liberals PC regulations in California.
Now we can expect paying another dollar more for a dozen eggs at the store.

Just got my car registration renewal in the mail. Because the low information voters didn't pass Prop 6 last Tuesday to repeal Jerry Brown and the Democrats gas and vehicle registration tax increase, I have to pay 25% more to register my vehicle.

Scuttlebutt is that Gavin Nesom and the Democrats plan to repeal Prop 13 and raise everyone's property taxes by 500 %.

 

Define what you call 'greed of businessmen'.
Recent increases for Landlords: Water, electric, real estate taxes, maintenance.
You need to do a bit of reading as to why there is a 'high' number of homeless, it has little to do with the cost of rent.

 

Every year without fail my property taxes go up, but our roads still look like the air force uses them for bombing practice. At regular intervals our sales tax goes up accompanied by the "It will only add 1c for every dollar spent". Every 2 years we have a bond issue with he standard cries of "It's for education" and every time the kids go back to school after a break we have the tables outside Walmart begging for donations of pencils and paper for the kids. We have vacancies for teachers in all grades which have been vacant for years but when a vacancy comes up for the school administration department it's filled within days.
It's not so much the taxes it's, what are they being spent on?

 

Not where I live, either. In fact, my federal income tax and personal property taxes have gone down, reducing my cost of living.

Of course, I don't live in a Democrat-run city where my cost of living probably would have gone up instead of down.

 

The article is factually incorrect. CPI data clearly shows that in the last 3 years prices have only risen 6.3%

Since 2010, prices have risen 15%.

If some Americans are spending 50% of their income on "necessities" which are defined as rent, groceries, transportation, utilities and healthcare, then that is a good deal.

Note that any time those people desire, they may move to another place where costs are lower, they just have to want to move.

 

I've read your thoughts, I'd be for giving it back to the owls.

 

Perhaps there is a difference between 'prices', as you say, and 'cost of living', as the article says.

What is the 'Cost of Living'?
The cost of living is the amount of money needed to sustain a certain level of living including basic expenses such as housing, food, taxes and health care. The cost of living is often used to compare how expensive it is to live in one city versus another. The cost of living is tied to wages because salary levels are measured against the expenses required to maintain a basic standard of living depending on the geographic region.

What is the 'Consumer Price Index - CPI'
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure that examines the weighted average of prices of a basket of consumer goods and services, such as transportation, food and medical care. It is calculated by taking price changes for each item in the predetermined basket of goods and averaging them. Changes in the CPI are used to assess price changes associated with the cost of living; the CPI is one of the most frequently used statistics for identifying periods of inflation or deflation.

Read more: Consumer Price Index (CPI) https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumerpriceindex.asp#ixzz5XDerpmYZ

Read more: Cost of Living https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-of-living.asp#ixzz5XDeltygU

 

My house outlived that PC spotted owl.

 

And wages have not gone anywhere. These "gig jobs" have no benefits and no future. This started under Obama when his so called recovery was to appoint people to the Federal Reserve Board who kept rates near zero. Corporations and Wall Street did not use the money to create jobs; they used it to play the market and to engage in financial engineering. Trump has continued the same stupidity. With Obama it was "Hope and Change"; with Trump it was "Make America Great Again." Neither did anything. There should have been huge infrastructure projects beginning in 2009. Trump even promised those in his 2016 campaign but nothing.

It goes back even further. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have done what is needed for workers in the last forty years.

 

The Republicans just paid lip service and were just pretending to oppose open borders for many years, and the Democrats jumped aboard the Neoliberal economics boat.

You had articles in business publications like The Economist (former President Bush was a reader) that noted this shift in the labor force and tried to say that it was a good thing.
Pretty much everything bad in the economy you can think of, these economics pundits were telling our leaders and policymakers that it was good thing.

 

Well someone has to pay for those Dreamers.

Guess what? When you add more kids to a school, the costs go up.
Either that or the quality goes down.

 

You mean it hasn't trickled down to you yet?

 

What do you mean by the "gig jobs" which were invented under Obama?

 

Uber driving. Adjunct professorships. All sorts of no benefit, temporary jobs. They may have not been invented under Obama, but they expanded under his administration. Democrats have been like Republicans when it comes to workers for about forty years. The point is Democrats have abandoned labor for decades. Pelosi's money raising has been to put hot button social issues out front to get donations from the upper middle class and the wealthy and let the workers take a beating. If Obama and Pelosi had held up Wall Street bailouts until a massive infrastructure program had been passed in late 2008 and early 2009 good jobs would have been created and the Democrats would not have lost over 1000 state and federal legislative seats during Obama's eight years. The Republican party was dead at the end of 2008. Pelosi and Obama gave them a gift.

 

I hope you realize it is a trend which would have happened no matter who was in the WH, just like the DOT.COM boom was going to happen with or without Clinton. Its not a bad thing. Uber drivers work for themselves, and many people like it that way. I worked for myself too, until the tax reform of 2018 turned it into a bad idea.

The government is bad at creating jobs, and the Dems did pass an infrastructure bill, which was opposed by the GOP.

 

This is expected when the FED prints money out of thin air. It is quiet, private taxation.

 

Inflation is quiet taxation, but there has not been much or it until recently.

 

Do the drivers set the conditions of the work? Do they set their own rates? It is a gig, a side hustle; it is not a career and it is not a business. It does replace a career that taxi drivers had. Go drive for Uber if it is such a good deal. Get a PhD and then be an adjunct professor with no benefits and hardly a living wage. See if you can pay off your student loans. When I went to the University of California there was NO tuition.

The problem is gigs are replacing good careers. It is no wonder socialism is very popular among the young. The current system has failed. The conservative Republicans and Democrats are old and dying off.

You are right about these changes happening under Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. They would not have happened under FDR.

 

Hm... I haven't noticed...

 

I think low wages (at least in many areas) are still keeping price levels down lower than they otherwise would have been.
In other words, there may actually have been more inflation than it looks like, that inflation was just disguised by the aftermath of the recession and low wage immigrant labor.

If we're ever going to tackle the issue of prosperity for the lower middle class, we're likely also going to be simultaneously tackling the issue of inflation at the same time, to some extent.

 

Wow... a thinking person!!!

 

Someone has to pay for the import taxes (tariffs), and that someone is you, and other American consumers.

Low wage immigrant labor does not have much to do with it, although price of housing will go up when they are kicked out.

 

Gosh, amazing how much of the nations manufacturing globalists exported to other countries.

Good thing the President is doing something about that.

 

I'm not happy about the government meddling in the markets. I do not like the government trying to force the way the economy functions. Economy runs the best without interference.

If imported granite looks good, and is cheaper than US granite, the government should stay out of the way and let us buy the imported granite. Why should we pay the government 30% tax so we can have the granite we want? That's BS economics.

 

It was called propping up a community organizer's economy by printing trillions of dollars without having anything to back it up with.

Well if you owned gold which is easy to buy and freaking hard to sell, you did pretty good with Obama in the White House.




When the value of the dollar decreases, the value of gold increases.