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Comment by akmarinov | Hacker News Reader

Unemployment is at an all time low, so yeah...

Unemployment is a tricky stat, which according to BLS conveniently excludes unemployed people who "haven't looked for a job in 4 weeks." And then knowing how difficult it is to pull hard information out of these poverty stricken areas, especially hidden homeless, I feel confident the whole picture is being blurred intentionally.

I live in a high poverty city with wondrously low "unemployment" but a high number of people who don't have jobs. The answer: if you can qualify for a job, yes you can get a job, but a lot of people do not qualify for anything worthwhile, so why try?

U6 is also at an all time low: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE

So yeah.. Fed has a tool for that.. which they will keep hammering

People still need to eat and that food gets processed and delivered with energy. They'll have to heat their homes in the coming months, all of that has been hit hard with energy prices and is something that can't be wished away with higher rates.

Are you implying that people have zero control over their spending?

On inelastic products, if you've read my point above - yeah.

Can you turn off your spending on food?

Edit: from the report:

> Increases in the shelter, food, and medical care indexes were the largest of many contributors to the monthly seasonally adjusted all items increase.

Can't turn off spending for food and medical care if you want to live

You need a house, you don't need a nice house. You can buy food you need to cook instead of expensive premade stuff - or even go to primarily rice, beans, and potatoes. Medical care you can put off, switch to a cheaper generic medication, etc.

I can absolutely turn off my spending for food, probably by 95%. If I lost my job I’d switch to beans and rice and other cheap homemade food and totally cut out anything expensive like takeout. I could live out of my pantry and freezer for a while if I had to, even.

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