alt Hacker News> credit card debt hit an all-time high last year ($1.28 trillion, Q4 2025)
Let me inflation adjust that for you: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpo. Even better, as a percentage of disposable income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpt
> real hourly wages, only 3%
Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpE. Doesn't look so dire to me?
Whenever I see someone quoting economic statistics I look them up on FRED and zoom out a little. Usually I close the article at that point. The "Ongoing collusion" table in this article is interesting, though. Capitalism breaks down without competition.
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https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
Also breaks down when few individuals command tremendous power. Tax policy has been //fantastic// for the very wealthy.
When prices rise and wages don't keep pace, individual solvency forces substitution of inferior goods. CPI's methodology then updates the basket to reflect the forced substitution and pretend it was voluntary. You think you are looking at rising real wages, but due to the basket methodology you are actually looking at the individual solvency constraint in a mirror. The economy could reduce people to eating bug burgers in homeless encampments and that line would still go up through the entire process.
Repeat the exercise using a real deflator and the results are different. Ideally, this would mean constructing a basket of things you (or the people in question) want to buy. In practice, nobody has time for that so people just use an asset with a reputation for holding value (gold) or a proxy for their most important aspiration (housing). These both have problems, but the problems are not nearly as bad as the circular logic in the CPI.