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Schu's avatar

There's also inflation caused by rising minimum wages in many states. People suddenly have more money in their pocket and landlords, grocery stores, and other businesses are reacting to the increased demand by raising prices. This is why raising the minimum wage doesn't really help people, it just resets the price floor to a higher level and leaves people exactly where they started.

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Celia M Paddock's avatar

That's something I've noticed as well. The typical low-skill service-industry job around here (I live in an economically depressed area of rural Iowa) was around $9 an hour before the lockdowns. Those same wages have risen to around $12 an hour, and businesses are still finding it difficult to hire enough workers.

I suspect that a lot of people realized during the Pandemic that they were better off living on government largesse. Others realized that the expenses involved with a two-income household, where one of the partners was only making minimum wage, were simply not worth it, especially since childcare has become harder and harder to find.

So the working class is buckling their belts tighter and getting by as best they can, while they watch more and more products rise in cost to beyond what they can afford.

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Schu's avatar

I think a lot of people chose to retire rather than keep working, and immigration, legal, and illegal, cratered during the pandemic, so we're feeling the full bite of the demographic taper we've been in for about ten years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#/media/File:USA2020dec1.png

The big millennial bulge peaked ten years ago, and there are roughly 1 million less workers per age than there were then. Between demographic birth decline and immigration collapse, there are a lot more jobs than workers right now, and the problem is only going to get worse, not better, because the taper has continued. We're going to look very much like Japan, with an old population supported by too few workers.

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