Unfortunately for a growing majority,housing and food are becoming luxury items.

The examples given of the luxury goods purchased, e.g., $860 shoes, shows how little reality content the explications of things like “the economy”, and “the jobless rate”, foisted on us by the so-called experts contain.  Hardly any reality content at all.  Think about it.  One pair of shoes purchased for $860, counts the same toward the Gross National Product as 20 pairs of poor peoples shoes at $43 each, which can be readily obtained, quite serviceable. The sale is even reported in the same account in our national accounts. So, the NYT journalist will consider that the “economy has improved”, when in fact, it hasn’t at all.  The fact that the GNP-GDP has gone up does not mean that the economy has improved, as Simon Kuznets so eloquently informed the US Senate in 1934. Also, the NYT journalists employ the term “jobless rate”, to refer to The Bureau of Labor Statistics category U3, unemployment, currently 9.2%  Nobody can read the full results of the latest BLS survey and conclude that the percentage of people who want jobs and don’t have them is less than 20%.  So, that’s the jobless rate.  The words “the economy” and “the jobless rate” have become shibboleths, meant to mislead and not to inform.

@glider

Yes. Trickle down economy is like looking at a vacuum cleaner and point out the fine (almost too fine to see) dust that is blowing out of the end of the machine while being asked to ignore the vast amount of stuff that is being sucked up at the front.

*sighs*
After three decades of proof to the contrary (or at least lack of proof for this theory) it is still dragged out?

I am very happy for those stores catering to people who have no taste and no idea how to spend all those billions they raked in from the bail out money. I am glad they can raise their prices sharply.

It does not help the 90pct of the population who is still reducing their spending because they are running out of money.

I guess it will have to come to food riots (and people’s revolution French style) before the ultra rich realise that you can’t keep squeezing money out of the poor and not expect repercussions.

It does not take a great deal of thinking and no great amount of intellect to understand that trickle down economy is not going to work. There is only so much goods a tiny fraction of the population can buy, and only so many people that can be employed by the few shops they frequent. All that money they spend on extreme luxury goods flows right to the top and back into the circuit of the ulta rich, where it came from. So the rich will employ a thousand people in the shops, and perhaps a few thousand more manufacturing their luxuries (though most of that is foreign import). It is a drop in the ocean of millions unemployed.
This is exactly why european countries have unemployment benefit programs, so that people who lose their jobs do not drop out of the economy. They keep their houses and all expenses associated with it. They keep buying goods, perhaps not as much as before, but they keep shops running instead of living in a car (or in a tent outide the city limits) and eating out of the garbage. They keep money flowing in the economy even in hard times and while the extra tax prevents the economy from growing as quickly, at also prevents it from collapsing as completely.