Voting For Your Wallet

“How can you get involved in a way that positively impacts your wallet?”

If you’re just making ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck, it's important to remember that it didn't used to be that way. While the U.S. has always had a capitalist economic system, wages were once more closely equated to the cost of living. Officials had the gaps among the cost of living, wages, and inflation on their radar. Now, those gaps are further than they've ever been.

As former Fed chair Ben Bernanke put it, inflation boils down to when the aggregate quantity of goods demanded at a particular price is higher than the available quantity of goods at that price level. For example, many Americans want a certain amount of bread at a certain price, and there’s only so much bread in the country available at that price, so eventually their "want" for bread at that price exceeds what’s available, and the price goes up.

If you’ve ever been unemployed, you’ve wondered how the unemployment formula, which doesn’t account for inflation, will meet your basic needs, while searching for the job that will provide an income that sustains you. During periods of inflation, even employed people often cannot meet their basic needs. Not increasing wages in conjunction with inflation can lead to American working class debt, disenfranchisement, and homelessness.

Labor regulations, minimum wage, the unemployment rate, and your national, state, and local budgets are all impacted by inflation. So how can you get involved in a way that positively impacts your wallet?

Pinion wants to improve the lives of working class people through civic engagement that leads to better policy for everyone. Technology that makes your voice heard with the swipe of a touch screen or the click of a mouse. And with enough of our voices heard — our representatives will have to translate their listening into action.

Every time you vote on Pinion for a spending bill, minimum wage, or anything that affects the cost of living, you're sending a reminder to your representatives: I’m still here, and this gap keeps widening for me and my family. If representatives don’t take your cost of living into account, you may not take them into account when you go to the voting booth.

During times of inflation it's important to...

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