91–100 of 144 posts
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Inflation is caused by deficit spending. It is a tool for government to increase spending without raising taxes.
Inflation is an increase in the cost of living. It can be caused by deficit spending. It can also be caused by supply shocks. For example, if you restrict building new housing, the price of housing will increase, both rents and house prices. If you tariff imports, a basket including those goods will rise in price to the degree those imports are not substituable. If you start a war in the Middle East, oil prices will…
Bob earns $20 every day. He buys 5 eggs $2/ea and 5 apples $2/ea every day. Now, due to supply shocks, egg prices double. He still has only $20, and so he now buys fewer eggs and fewer apples.
What happens when he buys fewer apples? The price of apples goes down, due to the Law of Supply and Demand. There is no inflation.
What happens when this economy is flooded with dollars? The Law of Supply and Demand again, meaning the value of each dollar drops. That means the dollar price of eggs and apples rise, as well as his wages.
Oil prices rising means people have less money to spend meaning prices of other things drop.
Another way to look at it is the US had zero net inflation from 1800-1914. From 1914 to today a dollar is worth 3 cents of a 1914 dollar. That isn't due to supply shocks, and there certainly were plenty of supply shocks before 1914.
1914 is when the Fed was created and empowered to print money with no backing.
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This corresponds with the increasing share of the economy consumed by the government. > the hourly wage This is a misleading statistic. The actual statistic is "total employee compensation", which includes the benefits packages, the (so-called) employer contribution to SS, 401k employer contributions, etc. The TEC is often worth up to 150% of the wages.
FRED shows Federal outlays as a percent of GDP broadly leveling off and declining. 2008 GFC and COVID being transient exceptions https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S Meanwhile here's employee compensation* over GDP (both seasonally adjusted) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XO2h Any chance you can share the sources for your assertions? * includes benefits as per https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodolog…
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The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973. It is even lower if you are only counting non-management roles then and now. Wages have not gotten better over the past half century they have gotten worse. Workers now work more hours pee year to try to catch up to what they made back then, so working conditions are worse now as well.
This corresponds with the increasing share of the economy consumed by the government. > the hourly wage This is a misleading statistic. The actual statistic is "total employee compensation", which includes the benefits packages, the (so-called) employer contribution to SS, 401k employer contributions, etc. The TEC is often worth up to 150% of the wages.
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Because of complete NIMBY victory, not because the youth are greedy. YIMBY is the way.
Maybe partly. But developers make more money building the biggest houses they can sell. So that's what they build.
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It’s not hard to do. A lot of them are for sale today and will sell over asking, no contingencies.
A housing development nearby my home was built in the early 1960s (I think). If you look closely at the homes, they are all of two designs, made into four by mirror images. But it's pretty clear that over time the homes were remodeled, gut remodeled, extended, garages added, and so on, so they are significantly improved over the original. I've been in a couple, and the hallways are pretty narrow and everything is ver…
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> Take a tour through Fort Williams. There is a collection of clothing from the Revolutionary War. The baby clothes look like doll clothes, and the adult clothes look like they were for boys. Then look at the clothing in the Gettysburg museums. The people were taller then, but still about the size of boys. I don't think that's a correct interpretation, see the explanation here [0]. Not quite the same situation, but l…
> Are you sure the "adult" clothes weren't made for young boys or teens, or women? Yes. I read the informative cards at the display. Some were for officers. George Washington was a giant in his day. Look at the short beds and low ceilings. Watch your head walking through a doorway! Tour a navy ship of the time. If you like, look up historical US statistics on height. BTW, I saw Henry VIII's armor in London. Looked li…
> If you like, look up historical US statistics on height.
Yeah, people in the 1700s were, on average, 2 inches shorter. Not the tiny dwarves you're describing.
> BTW, I saw Henry VIII's armor in London. Looked like a boy's armor.
This? [0]
Dimensions: H. 72 1/2 in. (184.2 cm); W. 33 in. (83.8 cm); D. 14 1/2 in. (36.8 cm); Wt. 50 lb. 8 oz. (22.91 kg)
Apparently a six foot tall man is a boy?
The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.
2026 - 200 = 1826 Yeah no. It's only since 1950 that conditions improved for everyone. Before then everything from sewage, to coal smoke, to chronically low wages made life worse for everyone involved. The most miserable people to live in history were the British working class in the mid/late 19th century.
You can see some of this repeating in China. Migrant workers move to the cities because, while what they can earn is low, it is a lot higher than subsistence farming in the countryside. "The Last Train Home" (documentary) follows such a family, although to understand the tragedy in the documentary you need to understand that Mao created the hukou system to prevent exactly this, which means that their children can only receive state education in the countryside.
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FRED shows Federal outlays as a percent of GDP broadly leveling off and declining. 2008 GFC and COVID being transient exceptions https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S Meanwhile here's employee compensation* over GDP (both seasonally adjusted) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XO2h Any chance you can share the sources for your assertions? * includes benefits as per https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodolog…
Just google total compensation vs salary.
So that compensation covers less.
The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.
The US Department of Labor measures wages, and adjusted for inflation the hourly wage is below what it was in 1973. It is even lower if you are only counting non-management roles then and now. Wages have not gotten better over the past half century they have gotten worse. Workers now work more hours pee year to try to catch up to what they made back then, so working conditions are worse now as well.
Show me on one of these graphs:
Income up after inflation:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252881600A
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Hours down: