When we can get congress to pass it.

Maybe he fantasized about doing that:

“You would have known if I had gone down on a helicopter with Trump,” Brown said Thursday. “I’ve never been on a helicopter with Trump.”

Individuals do really dumb things when there are financial incentives to do them.

It takes fixing those incentives.

Gift link you can edit into your post to give everybody access to the updates

Yes, the federal minimum wage hasn’t risen; that’s static and requires an act of congress to change. What happened is that the pandemic also gave a lot of people negotiating power, so the wages most people earn went up more than prices.

Wages weren’t stagnant though.

The key thing is that right now, wages are rising at about 4% per year, while prices are rising at about 3% per year. That’s a good place to be.

Inflation of 3% per year is lower than median wage growth; it’s generally considered somewhat desirable because it transfers wealth from lenders (who tend to be well-off) to borrowers (who are less so)

The key thing is that it dropped down to around the long-term average of 3% per year. And did it quickly and without a recession. That combination is downright amazing.

And getting there means having the political power to implement it. Which we haven’t had since the New Deal era.

Not at all. No capitalist system is going to give you some wonderful fair everybody gets gold at the end of the rainbow outcome.

But policies we had within that system on net made Americans appreciably better off than was the case in countries without them.

Statistics are good at describing averages and medians; not everybody has the exact same experience.

The key thing is that wages went up by enough to cover increased costs, and prices stopped their rapid rise once the pandemic shortages ended.

That’s not the underlying problem — it’s that we’ve got a Senate structured in a way which favors the right-wing parts of the country, and a population which isn’t voting for left-of-center candidates with the kind of overwhelming (think 75%) majority that it takes to reshape the country.

They actually did a whole lot when they had absolute-minimum majorities in 2020-2021. Just not on spending for housing — a couple of the Democratic Senators were bought off and opposed to it.

Rules vary a LOT by university in the US; there isn’t one consistent standard.

What happened with the chip shortage is that the automakers shifted to fancier trims and making fewer vehicles at higher prices. All new cars became outrageously expensive.

That would require having both houses of Congress in favor of spending significant amounts of money. The Republicans control one, so it’s not happening this cycle.

The fact that it’s right-wing religious schools getting funded is why.

That’s a very very tiny part of the problem for fireflies

That probably worked ok because:

1. You had incandescent lights, which used 99% of their energy on heat production instead of light production
2. it wasn’t as hot to begin with