431–440 of 563 posts
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This completely false talking point is a disease. "Normal" foods like rice and beans are dramatically cheaper than "junk" food.
You know, you make such a good point here. The easiest solve for this is for the fat poor people to simply eat rice & beans. That will surely fix both problems.
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> But the two largest costs to our finances are ridiculously outsized: Child Care and Health Care. I thought the same thing. We pay 5.5k for two kids per month. But then I looked at the regulations on professional child care. You need one certified worker and 250 sq.ft. of indoor space (in an expensive city) per 4 kids. After professional insurance, healthcare and other ancillary wage costs, there's really not that m…
>We pay 5.5k for two kids per month You can pay a fraction of that if you're ok with you paying cash and then learning Spanish. It won't have any of the administrative/compliance bloat either, if you catch my drift. >the only option would be billions in subsidies.
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These are two symptoms of the same problem, I don’t see any issue with the statistics. Plus, of course, not everyone who’s poor or hungry is obese. If you think about it, it makes sense that food insecurity and obesity go together. If I didn’t know when I’d have food, I’d try to overeat when I could, like many wild animals do before winter. And most of our cheap food is low quality and very high in fat and carbs (esp…
Did you really just compare human beings to wild animals who hibernate?
I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise: look at the main stock market in your country, and see how far back you must go for the main index to be half of what it is today. The answer is probably somewhere between 5 and 7 years. Then find salary statistics, and see how much the average salary has increased in the same time. The answer is probably somewhere between 20 and 30%. And it really is as simpl…
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If you put a 2.5% annual tax on net worth, that net worth would very rapidly find its way to other countries. Wealthy people would learn to structure their earnings to flow into businesses in other countries to avoid this wealth tax. This would reduce income tax in the United States. I would guess the overall effect would trend toward a net tax loss. If you gave 40 million people an extra $15K per year to spend, the…
The $15k is being transferred from entity A to entity B. Both entities are not spending the $15k so there wouldn't be any effect on inflation. If you printed an extra $15k then that would cause inflation because both entity A and entity B would be spending $15k. Inflation, which means a steady rise in prices overall, happens only when the total money supply in an economy grows. This increase in money, often called "p…
I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise: look at the main stock market in your country, and see how far back you must go for the main index to be half of what it is today. The answer is probably somewhere between 5 and 7 years. Then find salary statistics, and see how much the average salary has increased in the same time. The answer is probably somewhere between 20 and 30%. And it really is as simpl…
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Over the long run, though, sustained returns depend on fundamentals like productivity growth, population growth, and inflation. Without productivity gains, corporate profits would eventually stagnate, making it difficult to maintain a 7% annual return. Risk premiums, interest rates, and valuations also change over time, so fixed assumptions rarely hold for decades. In short, the doubling math works, but it oversimplifies the economic reality that long-term stock growth ultimately relies on productivity.
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This assumes the wealth transfer doesn’t affect the price of assets and services which is of course bonkers. More than likely the transfer will happen and affordability will not improve due to inflationary pressures.
Inflation, which means a steady rise in prices overall, happens only when the total money supply in an economy grows. This increase in money, often called "printing money," can be physical cash or digital money created through lending and government policies. Without more money in the system, if prices go up in one area, they have to go down somewhere else because the total money available limits how much can be spen…
You’ll redistribute the money such that the things that people receiving the subsidies need/want now have more money chasing them. That will cause inflation of those goods.
I don’t think this causes lasting inflation, it causes a step up of inflation. Precisely in a way that once every thing stabilizes nobody is better or worse than they were previously. I read Friedman in ECON 101 thirty years ago, I’ve probably forgotten a lot but not the role of velocity in MV=PQ.
I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise: look at the main stock market in your country, and see how far back you must go for the main index to be half of what it is today. The answer is probably somewhere between 5 and 7 years. Then find salary statistics, and see how much the average salary has increased in the same time. The answer is probably somewhere between 20 and 30%. And it really is as simpl…
Speaking as someone from the US, how is this a meaningful comparison in anyway? Honest question. Sure, wage growth sounds good in an upward trending market, but let's say the market has gone down 30% over the past five years. Would you expect everybody to take a 30% pay cut? If Walmart had a blockbuster year because their suppliers charged less (more efficient means of production), how are Walmart employee wages inte…
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What is sickeningly upsetting is how difficult it seems to be for our news organizations and talking heads to talk openly about this fact.
its not difficult - it's that they very clearly HATE class consciousness. just look back at occupy wallstreet. it got coverage that was nearly universally mocking it and sneering at it, and the second they were able to ignore it and pretend it didnt exist anymore, corporate news moved on. everything is framed as us-vs-them in corporate news, and its usually one political party against another, and it's usually for st…
This is exactly how I remember the coverage, but it’s notable that these people tied their own noose:
Occupy Richmond 10/6/11 Intro to "Progressive Stack" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCwhlZtHhWs
The leadership then largely went along for the ride in the technology and corporate finance sectors by electing to become a pseudo-priesthood under the banner of DEI. A lot of money got siphoned off by these people during the boom in exchange for countersignalling the anti-corporate sentiment prevalent among progressive coalitions at the time. This declined somewhat during the latter half of the 2010s after the tech companies started censoring conservatives (“They’re a private company, they can do whatever they want.”), and then the trend reversed when Biden’s senility became obvious, and the tech companies pivoted to Trump and started (disingenuously) signalling that they were anti-woke. In a lot of ways, Peter Thiel’s entire model of hiring ostensibly right-wing influencers (while himself being a homosexual immigrant) mirrors that of woke capital 10 years prior.
A few months ago I had a persistent irritation on my right eye, as if some dust was stuck there. Worried about it, I went to Urgent care and got billed $3400 (dollars) for antibiotics, WHICH WERE WRONG, an actual ophthalmologist said I had it scratched and just had to apply some drops. $250 for the ophthalmologist and about $50 for the drops. This week I am in Brazil for vacation, and my mother-in-law had a lot of ba…