Comment on The $20 USD bill is the new 5$ bill
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 10 hours agoRelative to what? Gold? British Pounds? Crude oil?
All measures of value are relative; they only mean anything based on their value relative to other things.
Commodity prices might drop significantly when an economy crashes and there’s low demand (look at the price of soybeans in 2025), but consumer prices either stay the same or continue to rise (didn’t see your grocery bill shrink when commodity prices dropped, did you?)
Economists might measure the value of the USD against high-level metrics such as commodities and precious metals, but what matters to the average person is the value of the USD relative to consumer prices.
Maybe technically the USD only increased in value by $1.85 in ten years, but if the cost of bread or toilet paper or a meal at a restaurant doubled or quadrupled in that time, then really the value of the dollar dropped significantly as far as the consumer is concerned.
butwhyishischinabook@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
The cost of bread, toilet paper, and restaurant meals for the average American may have increased significantly more than $5 -> $6.85, but I promise it hasn’t literally quadrupled. Things are inacceptably bad but this isn’t Turkey yet. Do you have any indication that for the average American the average purchased good has quadrupled in ten years? The responses here are almost as unhinged as the takes over in MAGA world. This is insane.
Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
I can proof with literal receipts that prices of goods have gone up 50-100% in less than 5 years.
This is a weird time to claim someone is being unhinged and comparing them to maga. One even claim that is being unhinged and maga like.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
I’ll allow OP a little bit of hyperbole to get their point across; this is an internet forum, after all, not a peer-reviewed journal…
butwhyishischinabook@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
It’s not a little bit of hyperbole, I literally linked to a calculator that uses the Consumer Price Index. OP’s claim isn’t even vaguely in the realm of the actual consumer price increase.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
My point is that those high-level macroeconomic metrics are completely divorced from the financial realities of ordinary people.
If you think the cost of living has only risen slightly relative to the buying power of the average wage-earner, then you must be sheltered and insulated by having wealth and income levels that are well-above average.