"Doomcasting"

 

The previous post generated a comment accusing me of "doomcasting". I don't take umbrage at the comment because one's perception of a sporting event is influenced hugely by where you are sitting in the stadium.

The toffs-and-swells in the box seats experience one game. The folks in the cheap-seats experience a different game. The athletes sitting in the winning-team's dugout experiences a very different game than the team sitting in the loser's dugout. And the custodians who clean up the bleachers after the game will have their own impressions.

Sorting through the options

One possibility is that the comment was submitted by a troll or an animated spam-bot and should be summarily dismissed out of hand.

The other option is that the person who wrote the comment truly believes what they wrote. So ERJ is going to put on his Forensic Psychologist's hat and paint a picture of that true-believer commenter.

The commenter was a guy

Not a huge leap. At least 80 percent of my readers are men. That is not good or bad, it just is.

The commenter is younger than fifty

Maybe much younger. It is hard to be casual about inflation after you had first-hand experience with it. My first house cost 50% of my (single-income) annual gross pay. I purchased it three years after I graduated from college. It was in a "safe" neighborhood and the majority of my neighbors were widows and very-young families.

The current median HOUSEHOLD income is about $60k/year and the median house price in the US is over $400k. To a young person, that kind of ratio is "normal" because they never knew anything different. That isn't 50%, it is 667% of annual income. Big difference!

 

Median house price last two years of Trump and 3.7 years of Harris/Biden

 

30 year mortgage rates last two years of Trump and 3.7 years of Harris/Biden (Source)

THis is a double-whammy because your first house-payments are almost entirely interest, so it is basically a multiple of the closing price * interest rate. Trump's last two years were $320k * 3.5% while Harris/Biden mid-term was $430k * 6.2% or about 2.3 TIMES HIGHER.

The commenter (or a family member) works in the public sector or for a public-sector affiliate

As-of 2023, three-quarters of all Federal Employees worked at least two-days-a-week from home and many worked five-days-a-week from home. It is very easy to think about crime-rates as "somebody else's problem" when you can cocoon in your swanky house in Bethesda, MD and phone-in your work performance.

Affiliates would include healthcare, road-construction and military equipment vendors. They are extremely insulated from the buffeting of the "real" economy.

Other affiliates include NGOs who are drinking from the money-firehose to import thugs from shit-hole countries.

The commenter does not have a gut-feel for lag-times in human judgement

Alan Greenspan coined the term "virtuous cycle". The psychology of inflation is the opposite of that. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Stores adjust prices to sell goods based on the price they EXPECT to have to pay for the replacement stock. Employees demand wages based on the prices they expect to have to pay next year, next month, next week and tomorrow as inflation heats up.

Obama famously blamed George W. Bush for problems even after being in office for seven years, so the idea that some kinds of problems need time to fester and incubate is not totally foreign to Progressives. 

Depending on your perspective

Every "doomcast" predicted in 2020 came true

or

Not a single dire prediction came true.