It's quick, catchy, and convenient to call out a few corp's which pay their workers squat while the bosses rake it in.
BUT - what about the ever-inflating costs of basic daily living - housing, food, medical care, transportation, and education - for the 99% of Americans who aren't too rich to care? Does that not count as "affordability crisis", because denouncing it risks being non-performative activism? After all, if we somehow rolled back that inflation, it would hit the pocketbooks of the 1% pretty hard...
But for 99% of Americans, "affordability crisis" is the ratio between the wages they receive and the prices they have to pay.
So if you could (say) roll back rents to pre-RealPage levels - from the PoV of the ~25M rent-burdened (and worse) Americans, would that meaningfully differ from receiving a huge wage increase?
There's the concern that once we get, say, a $30 minimum wage, that will drive prices up further and then people will be saying we need a $50 minimum wage. So we could wind up back where we started except it is harder to plan for the future, interest rates are higher which drives up the cost of housing and housing construction, etc.
The counter to that is an increase in total factor productivity which really makes us richer by being able to do more with less. That is, Henry Ford changed the world by creating a production system where workers plus a reasonable investment in capital could produce cars that those workers could afford. Contrast that to child care, for instance, where it just takes a certain number of workers to take care of a certain number of children. In the case of child care you can subsidize it so along side "expensive and available" you will get a certain amount with is "affordable at point of service but rationed" that is never enough.
Sorry to cut in. This debate made me wonder whether the Feds' inflation target is orthodox economists' idea of a positive-sum game. (Let's assume for the sake of curiosity that political-economists don't yet know about the second Law of thermodynamics, AND that exogenous factors like Fords/Jobs are highly unlikely-- see Paul Romer
Consider that UBI (or wage increases) can be either inflationary or deflationary, contingent on implementation.
Although commenters tend to assume one or the other.
Consider also that Japan is moving into an inflationary regime (whether premeditated or not, we will soon have data with which to compare JP, PRC _and_ ROC, the last one to be taken as a continuation of Abenomics)
which I think has an element of truth to it but that it also comes out of a need people have to believe that all problems are caused by a conspiracy of a few sinister people. Like it or not, people don't believe in markets and they don't believe in government. Maybe they are right to not believe in these things but in a certain sense it becomes a self-reinforcing pose.
BUT - what about the ever-inflating costs of basic daily living - housing, food, medical care, transportation, and education - for the 99% of Americans who aren't too rich to care? Does that not count as "affordability crisis", because denouncing it risks being non-performative activism? After all, if we somehow rolled back that inflation, it would hit the pocketbooks of the 1% pretty hard...