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The reason the feel of this economy is off is because people can still remember how things were going Pre-Covid, and they have a keen recollection of how much was 'lost' during the Covid period, and one can easily argue that we have not yet 're-established' the baseline from before, and with the current interest rates, we might not be able to anytime soon.
What is absolutely fair to say is that we avoided a serious recession resulting from Covid and the attendant restrictions.
But if you're an average American, you've likely depleted most of your personal savings., you've got a high car payment ("affordable" used cars aren't a thing anymore), and may be in default on the loan, your rent has increased around 30% since 2019.
Of course with savings depleted, more people will start financing purchases/using credit cards. In a rising-interest-rate environment.
Oh, and Student Loan payments just resumed after a LONG hiatus.. It's hard to feel good about higher wages if you can directly observe that most of the extra money is going to service debt and you can't actually put much of it away for later. It feels even worse if your overall debt continues to rise so you're treading water rather than making actual headway towards reducing your indebtedness.
So if you were motivated to convince people they were doing well, economically speaking, you could isolate the variable declaring that wages are up so you can say "stop complaining things have reverted to the pre-covid norm!"
But if you were to ask a simple-ish question: "Are you materially better or worse off today than you were in 2019?" I would hazard a guess that most people are 'struggling' to maintain their standard of living more than before, and this feeling comes through.
Now, my own personal concern is that we've already used up a bunch of economic 'slack' during Covid times, Putin started further troubles, and oh golly gee the Middle East is now acting up again. So at some point we have to start rebuilding our reserves for some possible future shock, and few seem interested in doing that. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was depleted to historic lows and, as of yet, has not begun to be refilled.
It is nowhere near empty, mind, I just find this illustrative of the situation. We burned a lot of spare capacity and we still seem to be teetering on a precipice, what else can we deploy if we actually tip over the edge?
Not sure what you mean by affordable, but they very much are. Just go on the internet and you can find used cars in working order which do good MPG for pretty damn cheap. Sure, most of them might be on the older side and a bit scratched, but that's hardly that important.
About 8 years ago I bought a '98 Honda Accord with 65k miles on it for a hair over $4k.
1.5 years ago I purchased a 2012 Honda Civic with 80k miles on it for a hair over $15k.
It is almost literally impossible these days to find a vehicle with <100k miles for <$10k.
If you find an 'affordable' car (read: could be purchased by a college student working part time) then it is going to be in rough shape, probably been in an accident, with >100k miles, which is to say it's going to come with a hefty maintenance/repair bill built in.
Car repairs are more expensive now, too.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/25/car-repair-costs-are-up-almost-20percent-over-the-past-year-heres-why.html
I would hardly deny that buying cars is more expensive now that several years ago, but the increase has been nothing like on the scale you're implying. Again, numbers are your friend. Since Biden took office average used car prices have gone up somewhere around 25%. That's bad, not even close to the over 2x increase you are suggesting.
And if you to any online second hand car website you can find stacks upon stacks of car with under 100k miles for well under 10k.
Edit: wrong link, correct one here https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA02
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It's not quite as bad in the midwest, though there's a lot of cruft, crappy manufacturers and (not always bad, but high-risk) salvage titles for more reputable builders.
But yeah, prices have absolutely skyrocketed. Most of these would have been advertised at about half of their current prices, and most dealers would be far more willing to negotiate, even as recently at 2015; if you go back to pre-cash4clunkers the difference is even more staggering.
Coastals might be able to hit that at 9k (though prices are before fees!), but if you don't want a used police car (don't do it) or lease car, you're probably more screwed.
I saw the 2014 Nissan Versa with 85k miles for about $7k and I click in and it says on there "1 or more accidents reported."
Anytime you see something that seems like a deal, there's gonna be some catch or other.
I'm seeing that the prices on those cars have come down over the past couple months, so I do wonder if there's signs of easing of prices in the near future.
I just distinctly remember when I was buying my Civic that I overheard the buyer in the next booth over talking with the salesperson about a $500+/mo payment on a 72 month note, for a used truck, and just wondered if it was me or everybody else that was losing their mind.
Also heavily annoyed that I've already had to dump $2000 worth of repairs into the Civic to keep it roadworthy, but I'm at least confident I can get another 100k miles out the engine w/maintenance if I were forced to.
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It's not really that they're older, it's that they're worn out; local asking price is 7000 dollars for cars with 140,000 miles on the clock (it is unusual to see anything under 100,000 at that price). 10 years ago, 7000 dollars was the basic asking price, for a "normal" compact car, with a third to half of that mileage.
Of course, the supply of new cars dried up in around 2016 since the American manufacturers stopped making them entirely for a variety of reasons (a negative real interest rate encourages you to buy a massive truck instead), but the other automakers didn't suddenly start making more cars and just raised their prices for a slightly more complicated (but not necessarily better) car.
And then there's the "it will be illegal to make a normal car in 2035, affecting ~95% of cars sold new today" thing (to say nothing of the environmental regulations that are inherently harder for small cars to pass) that means that, unless you're a Japanese or maybe South Korean company, you aren't putting any new R&D or spinning up manufacturing capacity for compact or subcompact cars (electric cars have to be as large as SUVs, because if they aren't they only have 160 miles of reliable range, and probably aren't passing the crash tests either).
Of course, I'm sure you could just move closer to work, but conveniently there's also a housing shortage, brought to you by the same people who manufactured the car shortage. The streetcar conspiracy, but in reverse.
That seems very, very high, you can go online and find cars with fewer miles than that in reasonable working order for a quarter the price.
Which people do you suspect of manufacturing both of these things?
No, you can't. The cheapest online offering for anything that can reasonably be expected to last 10 years is running 11,000-12,500. For reference, those exact same kinds of cars sold new in 2012 for 16,000 (and would last 20 years if bought new).
As such, inflation with respect to reliable personal transport is roughly 100%. Carmakers literally just decided to stop making compact cars and I don't think "lack of demand" is telling the whole story; SUVs and megatrucks get breaks on emissions since US regulations get laxer as the vehicle gets larger (so it's impossible to beat European and Japanese carmakers on price, since US carmakers have never been able to compete on quality and EU/JP cars are already making a profit since development on their small cars are justified as they're the only thing they're even allowed to sell domestically).
"Much like what happens if we tax the absolute shit out of/entirely prohibit outwards development, if we make cars more expensive by making sure it's impossible to make a cheap car through safety/environmental regulations (even though doing so objectively makes the roads less safe and results in a net emissions increase in the near-term; SUVs are worse than cars at both), this makes it less likely the average citizen will be able to afford property, so they'll have to rent from us. This pushes rents higher and
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