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The government is definitely to blame for a lot of the inflation issues. Printing money never works out well for the public.
I truly think most people are struggling more than before. Prices of everything has increased, while wages have not. The middle class is disappearing
This is only true if you consider lifestyle inflation. If you want to live like people did in the 1950s, it’s pretty easy (one car, 1,100 square feet house in q small town, no air conditioning, no internet, no cell phone, public schools, 98 percent home cooked meals, one driving vacation per year with sandwiches in a cooler)… you can be a manager at a fast food joint and support three kids in that life. You’ll feel very poor in comparison to everyone else now, but you’ll be 1950s middle class.
That's the part people seem to forget. I have friends who have new iphones every year, have new cars, go on Disney vacations every year, eat out constantly, etc... But then complain they're poor and can't get by on their pay.
Exactly! We simply have so much more now. I’m talking about the USA as that’s where I live.
The concept of “the middle class” doesn’t hold up as a framework to understand our modern economy. Instead, I look at it as the stratification of society into infinite tiers as more and more consumption options have been developed to suck money from you consistently no matter how much money happen to have… but an important point is that the vast majority of Americans live WAY above the “middle class” of decades past in terms of what you are getting. The unfortunate part is that social media and the attached mass advertising industry it supports algorithmically shows you the next step up in the ladder constantly. Always the next thing you could consume. Always someone else that is already there… and leaves us with the sense that we must be worse off than those before. And to the extent perception is reality, I guess that’s true. I hold more of a “reality is reality” value system, so I think life is amazing. I certainly wouldn’t want to live in any other time.
The recovery isn't going to happen (without serious reform, which is unlikely), another crisis is just going to happen as it does every 10-15 years and things will get gradually worse.
I think the crisis will be moreso be related to hyper-inflation and external factors. Perhaps something like a government default. A housing market crash seems unlikely to me because of how slow we've been building. That's not impossible though. **I'm not an economist**.
Printing money works great for the rich. It’s a way to appease the poor and give to the rich. There’s not much money left in circulation, that’s one way to continue the transfer of wealth.
Not libertarian here (lurker). Not trying to sound snarky… do you think hoarding of wealth by the billionaire class and corporate price gouging has any effect? It seems the wealthy are doing just fine and in fact experiencing growth. Or, am i off?
Who hoards wealth and where are they hoarding it?
If corporations are price gouging now, why weren't they before? Did Trump and Obama put a stop to that nonsense but Biden is too enfeebled to do so?
It is my limited understanding… prices adjusted (increased) during the pandemic to compensate for the spike in supply chain costs. Now that the pandemic is far from over the corporate overlords see we’re willing to keep paying… and they’re raking it in. I can’t help but draw a correlation between record profits, record CEO pay, stock buy backs ,and inflation, maybe that’s anecdotal…
I also do not have an exhaustive list of wealth hoarders…. and to your point about presidential intervention. I think any attempt at government intervention is thwarted by limited government hawks…. But as I said earlier “my limited understanding is”. I’m not a libertarian but I lurk to try and understand more….
well, you have a point there but there is nuance. I get the feeling that whatever hoarding the wealthy do is usually tied to political candidates claiming they are going to tax the rich etc. Not that they are not already getting heavily taxed as it is. The problem is that there are so many tax loopholes in the tax code that the wealthy can relatively easily reduce their tax burden.
I believe the largest threat to the United States is going to be the Fed and Congress's rapid printing of money. This in the long term is unsustainable and will cause the collapse of the US dollar. Put it however you want, but this is not going to be sustainable in the long term. The last 3 presidents printed over 20 Trillion dollars via budgets, "covid relief", etc. The value of the US dollar has decreased a lot.
The second largest threat to the United States is the increase of a totalitarian state with increased levels of mass surveillance. The Patriot Act was a huge blow to civil liberties, however in more recent history look at the Covid-19 pandemic. What happens when x person or x party (in general) gets into office and really dislikes opposition?
As long as the GDP grows with the printing of money it's all Gucci. While the dollar has "fallen" so did every other countries currency. The spending was to boost the economy and avoid a. Economic collapse from the pandemic, which id argue paid off. Yes we're now paying for it via inflation but I'd argue it's a fair trade off to even more businesses dying off and people being indefinitely unemployed. Will it sting and slow down growth for a few years? Yes. But it's preferable to the alternative of major recession.
Plus, the inflation was "over inflated" by companies getting zealous on how much they can raise prices. We're already seeing a pull back from that with dropping prices as consumers show they can't afford it.
Now you could make the argument that if a company couldn't survive COVID that's on them, but let's be honest, what good does the market filtering out companies that dont have the reserves to weather a pandemic do for us? Its a once in a hundred year event..
(Caviot: the government is 100% to blame for the housing crisis/inflation, complete government restriction on housing construction for the last 60yrs is at fault and arguably the leasing cause to why people can't grow wealth. Hard to do when rent keeps skyrocketing and mortgages require 4 cosigner's to qualify)
Honestly I think it’s our culture. We have a tendency to live above our means and we elect a government that does the same. If you look at government spending, Obama added 8T to the national debt, Trump 8T, and Biden 6T and counting. So 2/3 of our national debt came from the last 3 presidents. For the people, we have smaller families but larger homes, nicer cars and other stuff, spend more on entertainment, etc. All of this is a formula for rapid inflation. Wages won’t keep pace so we will feel poorer till it all balances out.
Back in 2010 it was evaluated that around 82k a year was enough for a family to live comfortably in the state of Missouri. Now it's estimated at 202k. That cannot be solely attributed to culture. I have a single 2 y/o daughter, my wife died, my house is fairly small on a fairly small plot of land but cost more than my parents VERY nice house they bought in the 1990s, I make 72k+ a year, and I BARELY scrape by. I have 0 subscriptions, I don't watch any TV, I DID buy a new game this year to keep me busy, I cook most meals, and on occasion I will skip meals to try to save some money.
I personally feel the issue with the economy is that capital has been booming while labor has been dying. It gives "economic experts" something to point to and scream "See? Everything is FIIIINE" whilst everyone below a certain threshold loses more and more buying power every year.
The cost of living increase is pretty much on track with the devaluation of the dollar. With the purchasing power down over half since 2010, cost of goods will be over double. It is what it is. And for every person who lives within their means like you, there are probably 50 who don’t. I know a lot of people that make way less than me but have 80k dollar trucks and 4k sq ft homes.
If the dollar is devalued and costs are rising because of that, why are wages lagging?
I guess that’s my disconnect, why are eggs costing twice as much, but the people who work the egg farms not being paid twice as much.
These things go hand in hand, right?
I don't know what's really going on. Economic numbers typically come from the government. The press can always trot out a sad case of some good person 'struggling' to support whatever narrative they're trying to push.
Inflation is real, and really hurting. Between that and tariffs I think people's spending power was pushed back and erased a decade or more of gains. We won't have the data to demonstrate this for many years though.
Regulations are getting worse, and they're lowering people's standards of living. How is a family better off if they can only afford one or zero electric cars instead of multiple internal combustion vehicles?
We're less free to travel. The TSA has been in place for a generation, there are adults that think to fly anywhere that price is the government x-raying them and groping their genatals. I remember driving to Canada without needing a passport, sometimes going though customs twice because it was nicer than driving through Ohio, and didn't add any time.
The layers of surveillance are scary. The number of people that are ready to give up on cash frightens me.
But I can't do anything about it. So I've got a nice place in the mountains to live out my days.
We absolutely have the data, it just isn't presented by the experts because the data directly contradicts their economic model. Whatifalthist literally covered it all in a video yesterday on YouTube
Yes.
Over the course of the last 50 years we've let a series of stupid ideas slide because individually they weren't a big deal and over time they turned into an avalanche. We should have maintained a zero tolerance policy for unconstitutional ideas.
If you're looking at the current mod,:
Inflation, a rise in interest rates as an attempt to slow inflation, and a rise in oil prices (double what it was 4 years ago) has an immediate effect on the average American. Inflation reduces the buying power of their wages and their savings. Wage growth lags inflation, and may never catch up. Higher interest rates make mortgages and other loans more expensive. Oil goes into the cost of everything, so any increase in the cost of oil is passed along.
If you're looking over generations:
Inflation and Breton-Woods / petro-dollar. Inflation destroys savings; you can't save for the house or car as well as in the past because your savings lose buying power over time. The dollar as the world's reserve currency was also a bad idea. The same idea brought down the British economy in the early 20th century. Everyone needs dollars for international trade. The only place to get dollars is the US. In order to get dollars, they sell goods at reduced cost to the US market and buy less goods from the US market. This is what people refer to as the trade deficit, though they typically blame other reasons for it.
It depends. When you say life is becoming harder for people financially, this is objectively true, but you might be referring to something other than what I am thinking. All in all, statistics such as median income (when adjusted for inflation) have not gone down drastically and are actually improving for the most part. However, so has the cost of goods, taxation/etc, so it is more expensive to live in America than it was 20 years ago.
The issue becomes dramatically worse when you look at the rate of growth. Median income is barely growing at all compared to the fast growth that was witnessed around the times before the 70s and 80s.
Additionally, this is happening all over the developed world. Japan, the UK, the EU, Canada.
It's all a result of us trying to have our cake and eat it too. High government spending with low taxes and high regulations. We have, not by the hand of any external force, made growth via the government expensive, and growth via the private sector impossible.
quality of life increases have slowed down starting with the middle class and downwards. A few generations ago even the bottom classes had major quality of life increases as time went by, think refridgerators, televisions, automobiles, microwaves, cell phones, computers. But right now, the last maybe 15 or 25 years, I think an argument can be made that it may have stopped for them. The money printers and first users are fully stealing as much purchasing power as can be had while the ignorant suffer the consequences.
There are a few issues I can think of, none of which completely answers the question but without which, pat answers like "fiat money" and "regulations" fall flat.
One of these goes back to the wage-price freezes of the Nixon era - and may actually go back to the underlying causes of the Great Depression. Until that depression, the US economy worked on a boom-and-bust cycle of about every twenty years. Keeping to that history, the post-WWII boom would have led to a bust (depression or recession) in the late 1960s/early 1970s. This would have been on top of the inflation of the 1960s, which was fueled in part by the Cold War, the Space Race, and the various entitlement programs started under the Johnson administration. Nixon tried to do an end-run around this by instituting wage-price freezes (which in the end only froze wages, not prices). This pushed out the natural boom/bust cycle and may have been a factor in the stagflation of the mid-1970s. One reason for this is that everyone who lived through the Great Depression was so scared shitless of another, lesser, but natural depression that they tried to do everything they could to prevent its occurrence.
The problem is, the more you try to engineer your way around a depression, the worse it's going to be when it finally hits. So... we had a bunch of smaller recessions under Ford, Reagan, Bush-père, etc. Many of these were exacerbated by the market consolidations of the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s (leveraged buyouts, mergers, and acquisitions), leading to massive unemployment, underemployment, and shifts in what jobs there are, where they're located, and what they pay...
The next issue are the costs of labor and manufacturing. The invention of containerized shipping and container ships brought down the cost of transporting goods manufactured abroad, where the regulatory environment is less strict and the cost of labor is much lower. Many large businesses went international, migrated their manufacturing to lowest-cost countries and their bases of operation to lowest-taxed/lowest-regulated countries. This caused the loss of many thousands of US jobs, many of which paid their workers reasonably well (e.g., unionized auto manufacturing).
One might here argue for the shift of jobs to the information economy, which sector grew slowly until the creation of local-area networking and later, the World Wide Web. As the Web became commercialized, a new sector opened up - but it was largely restricted to recent college grads. The displaced steel workers and auto workers and so on were largely stuck where they were with no place to go. Meanwhile, as the Internet grew and high-speed access became more common, tech companies realized that they could hire programmers from anywhere around the world. Many of the best-known software companies of the 1990s were headquartered in Ireland or South Africa or Russia, and chipmaking moved almost exclusively to East Asia - displacing US workers and forcing many US residents once employed in that sector to move from higher-paying jobs to those barely above minimum wage in the few customer-service positions that haven't yet been outsourced to India, the Philippines, or Latin America. Also, as the sector matured, there was less need for full-time IT positions; most of these jobs are now performed by itinerant gig workers, many of who are lucky to be paid the equivalent of minimum wage (since they are technically contractors, sub-contractors, and/or freelancers, minimum-wage laws don't apply).
In many business sectors, automation has also reduced the number of available jobs. Largely these have _not_ been replaced by new jobs in other sectors (at least not in similar numbers), mainstream libertarian dogma notwithstanding.
Also keep in mind that the employment/unemployment numbers are always going to be misleading. They do not count people who are underemployed (working basic, entry-level jobs even though they have years of experience, or working part-time instead of full-time, or forced to do gig work rather than a "real" job with benefits and so on), people who have been unemployed for longer than six months (who have run out of unemployment benefits), and people who have given up looking for a job because there's nothing out there for them...
So: fear of a depression, the Cold War, inflation, market consolidation, globalization, sector shifts, and automation have all played factors in many Americans' inability to achieve even the shadow of a thought of "the American dream"...
Whatifalthist just released a video that addresses this exact topic last night. He explains it much more eloquently than I ever could in a comment section.
I do social work and to sum it up, yes we are in worse situation then we were
but we are better off then a lot of other countries.
Government is to blame for a lot of this. We spend trillions of dollars on war and barely any of that on education, housing, clean water and food.
Areas of the country that have had to be more self sufficient feel the draw down less then others. So the midwest has plenty of farmers and space so ppl are more heavily reliant of obtaining food through famers and/or fishing and hunting. Theyre communities are smaller and change less often so they rely on each other and take more pride in their communities.
In contrast, large cities have communities that change more often so neighbors are not reliable (this affects the schools and resources), you see more homelessness and most people wouldnt know what to do if their local shops shut down.
Putting it simply if there were a zombie apocalypse ppl in the city would be trying to get out quickly, where as ppl in the country would be trying to lock down their communities and resources from the outside.
The government is beyond a spending problem IMO, we are so far in debt there is no coming out of it without changing the currency and what backs it entirely. The only way out is forward, which is why we continue to create war to strip other countries of resources and political power in the guise of righteousness.
Our banking and political system is morally corrupt. Most religious institutions and their leaders will not be welcomed at heavens gates as they have lost their way and taken paths of greed and egotism. Our country is divided over trivial topics and does not know how to communicate in a way that both celebrates our differences and gathers us in our commonalities. The fuel is fear and we drive blindly in the dark.
The state can't go 6 trillion a year into debt without there being severe economic consequences. People should intuitively understand this is not sustainable long term. The only way they can keep the system afloat is by printing money. But every time they print money, they devalue all the already existing currency, which is the cause of the inflation we are all suffering under. That's the primary cause of all our economic woes. Everything else is a symptom.
Yes, it's pretty obvious to anyone who can remember how it was before 2000 in the west, things will only get worse as older generations die off and newer generations post 2000, those of today who are heavily brainwashed by public institutions to follow the hivemind (the collective) and think cutting of genitals is somehow natural and normal.
Government is a part of this, but there are powers far larger than governments are, such as supranational institutions that can order all governments who signed for their bs, such as the EU and UN, etc. to follow their will, which is pretty much almost the entire globe, that's why they're called globalists and governments just can be seen as bureaucratic provinces of the new undemocratic elite. Positions of power have already been corrupted, most easily done in democratic countries to get your own guys in seats of power, especially in a materialistic atheistic society, even when we never had true democracy, what we got or democracy in itself where the means to get to the end game where humanity itself is the enemy, which is easily seen by the environmentalist dogmatists, i.e. the new religion of ideology not based on fact and logic, but on lies and intellectual inferiors, is self evident for anyone with a brain and is cognitive stable.
This eventually will lead in to a technocratic authoritarian autocratic totalitarian world state, where there are only two classes: the elites who intermarry to keep the bloodline going and the rest, who mainly will serve no function, so you can expect a massive democide (as with all leftist governments), which I believe was already well underway post ww2 (by poisoning babies coming out of the womb, food and water supplies, the air and environment, mass immigration and potential ww3, but the changing of dna is probably sufficient in few generations from now when such people will be unable to bring forth babies). You can expect fake science, just as in ww2 where 'science' proved that some humans somehow where worse than rats take authority, hence tecnocracy (i.e. the experts) as a means of weaponization to further the twisted sick anti human ideological agendas to continue and ramp up to destroy you in every possible way you can think of (financially, freedom of movement and even your body as your own property).
If you saw how people volunteered to police their peers during the plandemic, there is very little hope to turn things around and that humanity has peaked and that we're entering in a dark age that at least will last for 1000 years, I expect for at least 3500 years, if humanity still can survive, probably not, but the elites at best or all dead before than.
Libertarianism and liberty in general probably will die out within 1-2 generations, inc. freedom of speech and eventually freedom of thought. Let's be honest, most people are too dumb and responsible for the shit we're going through. People were smarter in the past, despite less information directly at their disposal. You're living through the free will of humanity right now.
See this excellent 2h breakdown by professor Marc @ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LyCQYfe\_\_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LyCQYfe__w)
Addendum, just quick read/skimped through the rest of the comments, they're almost all about economics and finances and are of little importance to your question...
It's not about money, it's about control and the ability to force you. You can have 3 billion usd during the lockdown and your liberty was just as much limited as a poor man with just $0.01. To think the problem is government who prints money, which is factually not true, it's the private/central bank(s) (depending where you live), the gov is just an institution to enforce its will on its subjects while inflation by printing money and setting the rates is a means of incentivizing people how to live.
For example, the amish don't give a shit about how much the central banks print, nor do people who are not citizens who live in the woods or jungle and anyone who already opted out and living off the land.
That's the problem with libertarianism nowadays, too much focus on money and money creation, something you will never have full control of and is responsible for the enslavement of humankind, if you really wanna know the truth. The word liberty should be taken more serious, imho and it's something that will vanish not long time from here on out, inc. papermoney, but money that is programmed where, on what, with caps and expiration dates, etc. you can give out this money. This is awaiting you, so is libertarianism, which had its main focus liberty (where liberalism came from initially) -> money (now libertinism, the irony) then arguing in to eternity how to find workarounds for programmed money (probably another derivate of liberty, that long time ago already has lost its meaning)?
Yeah, something to think about, because time is running out and anything money is not the solution, but at best a temporal one if you decide to move out of the west for the remaining time of your life now that you literally can buy yourself out of this shit, before it literally becomes useless outside of the scope of the elites, who will enforce what its worth will be (by aforementioned conditional variables programmed in to it). Be smart and don't waste your time like marxists do, which can be an entire lifetime of useless debates. There is a famous saying that libertarians are usually poor as mice, because they theorize too much like marxists do. Make of that what you will.
Capitalism creates wealth. States and their central banks funnel that wealth to the plutocracy and oligarchs. In turn, some people demand more socialism, which destroys even more wealth and does nothing about the fundamental problem of states and central banks.
It's the astonishing amount of wealth amassed at the top and the power of that wealth over our politics.
See: https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?si=-i3NcsaCmTqUrQ63
The climate is falling apart.
Home ownership is a fleeting dream to many. Considering this is a sub dedicated to people who respect property, I would hope that the ability to acquire a home of their own would be a bellwether of the overall health of the economy. Or at least the economy that I have been led to believe you would desire, as a libertarian.
The industrial revolution built the middle class, made home ownership possible for the masses, and created the American Dream of every generation doing better than the last.
You can't piss away millions of jobs, and turn from a manufacturing based economy to this "Service Based" economy without repercussions.
It’s socialism. People who work full time still have all of life’s necessities. But it’s possible their rent is subsidized and they receive food assistance. And those social welfare programs allow them to be comfortable working for less. And so it keeps them renting forever and they don’t acquire wealth. They don’t buy as many things as folks did linger ago. We buy more subscriptions.
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The government is definitely to blame for a lot of the inflation issues. Printing money never works out well for the public. I truly think most people are struggling more than before. Prices of everything has increased, while wages have not. The middle class is disappearing
This is only true if you consider lifestyle inflation. If you want to live like people did in the 1950s, it’s pretty easy (one car, 1,100 square feet house in q small town, no air conditioning, no internet, no cell phone, public schools, 98 percent home cooked meals, one driving vacation per year with sandwiches in a cooler)… you can be a manager at a fast food joint and support three kids in that life. You’ll feel very poor in comparison to everyone else now, but you’ll be 1950s middle class.
That's the part people seem to forget. I have friends who have new iphones every year, have new cars, go on Disney vacations every year, eat out constantly, etc... But then complain they're poor and can't get by on their pay.
Exactly! We simply have so much more now. I’m talking about the USA as that’s where I live. The concept of “the middle class” doesn’t hold up as a framework to understand our modern economy. Instead, I look at it as the stratification of society into infinite tiers as more and more consumption options have been developed to suck money from you consistently no matter how much money happen to have… but an important point is that the vast majority of Americans live WAY above the “middle class” of decades past in terms of what you are getting. The unfortunate part is that social media and the attached mass advertising industry it supports algorithmically shows you the next step up in the ladder constantly. Always the next thing you could consume. Always someone else that is already there… and leaves us with the sense that we must be worse off than those before. And to the extent perception is reality, I guess that’s true. I hold more of a “reality is reality” value system, so I think life is amazing. I certainly wouldn’t want to live in any other time.
It is going to take a long time to recover from the mistakes of lockdowns and printing so much money.
Don’t worry, they’ll print more money long before we have time to recover.
The recovery isn't going to happen (without serious reform, which is unlikely), another crisis is just going to happen as it does every 10-15 years and things will get gradually worse.
Economists are already warning of another market crash. And the housing market bubble in most of the US is getting ready to pop like in 2008.
I think the crisis will be moreso be related to hyper-inflation and external factors. Perhaps something like a government default. A housing market crash seems unlikely to me because of how slow we've been building. That's not impossible though. **I'm not an economist**.
Printing money works great for the rich. It’s a way to appease the poor and give to the rich. There’s not much money left in circulation, that’s one way to continue the transfer of wealth.
That’s why Trump did it that way.
and biden. And obama.
I meant the stimulus checks Trump literally printed out and gave to every American.
Not libertarian here (lurker). Not trying to sound snarky… do you think hoarding of wealth by the billionaire class and corporate price gouging has any effect? It seems the wealthy are doing just fine and in fact experiencing growth. Or, am i off?
Who hoards wealth and where are they hoarding it? If corporations are price gouging now, why weren't they before? Did Trump and Obama put a stop to that nonsense but Biden is too enfeebled to do so?
It is my limited understanding… prices adjusted (increased) during the pandemic to compensate for the spike in supply chain costs. Now that the pandemic is far from over the corporate overlords see we’re willing to keep paying… and they’re raking it in. I can’t help but draw a correlation between record profits, record CEO pay, stock buy backs ,and inflation, maybe that’s anecdotal… I also do not have an exhaustive list of wealth hoarders…. and to your point about presidential intervention. I think any attempt at government intervention is thwarted by limited government hawks…. But as I said earlier “my limited understanding is”. I’m not a libertarian but I lurk to try and understand more….
well, you have a point there but there is nuance. I get the feeling that whatever hoarding the wealthy do is usually tied to political candidates claiming they are going to tax the rich etc. Not that they are not already getting heavily taxed as it is. The problem is that there are so many tax loopholes in the tax code that the wealthy can relatively easily reduce their tax burden.
I believe the largest threat to the United States is going to be the Fed and Congress's rapid printing of money. This in the long term is unsustainable and will cause the collapse of the US dollar. Put it however you want, but this is not going to be sustainable in the long term. The last 3 presidents printed over 20 Trillion dollars via budgets, "covid relief", etc. The value of the US dollar has decreased a lot. The second largest threat to the United States is the increase of a totalitarian state with increased levels of mass surveillance. The Patriot Act was a huge blow to civil liberties, however in more recent history look at the Covid-19 pandemic. What happens when x person or x party (in general) gets into office and really dislikes opposition?
As long as the GDP grows with the printing of money it's all Gucci. While the dollar has "fallen" so did every other countries currency. The spending was to boost the economy and avoid a. Economic collapse from the pandemic, which id argue paid off. Yes we're now paying for it via inflation but I'd argue it's a fair trade off to even more businesses dying off and people being indefinitely unemployed. Will it sting and slow down growth for a few years? Yes. But it's preferable to the alternative of major recession. Plus, the inflation was "over inflated" by companies getting zealous on how much they can raise prices. We're already seeing a pull back from that with dropping prices as consumers show they can't afford it. Now you could make the argument that if a company couldn't survive COVID that's on them, but let's be honest, what good does the market filtering out companies that dont have the reserves to weather a pandemic do for us? Its a once in a hundred year event.. (Caviot: the government is 100% to blame for the housing crisis/inflation, complete government restriction on housing construction for the last 60yrs is at fault and arguably the leasing cause to why people can't grow wealth. Hard to do when rent keeps skyrocketing and mortgages require 4 cosigner's to qualify)
Haaave you seen the consumer price index chart? :) that'll tell you everything you need to know.
Honestly I think it’s our culture. We have a tendency to live above our means and we elect a government that does the same. If you look at government spending, Obama added 8T to the national debt, Trump 8T, and Biden 6T and counting. So 2/3 of our national debt came from the last 3 presidents. For the people, we have smaller families but larger homes, nicer cars and other stuff, spend more on entertainment, etc. All of this is a formula for rapid inflation. Wages won’t keep pace so we will feel poorer till it all balances out.
Back in 2010 it was evaluated that around 82k a year was enough for a family to live comfortably in the state of Missouri. Now it's estimated at 202k. That cannot be solely attributed to culture. I have a single 2 y/o daughter, my wife died, my house is fairly small on a fairly small plot of land but cost more than my parents VERY nice house they bought in the 1990s, I make 72k+ a year, and I BARELY scrape by. I have 0 subscriptions, I don't watch any TV, I DID buy a new game this year to keep me busy, I cook most meals, and on occasion I will skip meals to try to save some money. I personally feel the issue with the economy is that capital has been booming while labor has been dying. It gives "economic experts" something to point to and scream "See? Everything is FIIIINE" whilst everyone below a certain threshold loses more and more buying power every year.
The cost of living increase is pretty much on track with the devaluation of the dollar. With the purchasing power down over half since 2010, cost of goods will be over double. It is what it is. And for every person who lives within their means like you, there are probably 50 who don’t. I know a lot of people that make way less than me but have 80k dollar trucks and 4k sq ft homes.
If the dollar is devalued and costs are rising because of that, why are wages lagging? I guess that’s my disconnect, why are eggs costing twice as much, but the people who work the egg farms not being paid twice as much. These things go hand in hand, right?
Nothing about our current system even remotely resembles free(ish) market capitalism.
I don't know what's really going on. Economic numbers typically come from the government. The press can always trot out a sad case of some good person 'struggling' to support whatever narrative they're trying to push. Inflation is real, and really hurting. Between that and tariffs I think people's spending power was pushed back and erased a decade or more of gains. We won't have the data to demonstrate this for many years though. Regulations are getting worse, and they're lowering people's standards of living. How is a family better off if they can only afford one or zero electric cars instead of multiple internal combustion vehicles? We're less free to travel. The TSA has been in place for a generation, there are adults that think to fly anywhere that price is the government x-raying them and groping their genatals. I remember driving to Canada without needing a passport, sometimes going though customs twice because it was nicer than driving through Ohio, and didn't add any time. The layers of surveillance are scary. The number of people that are ready to give up on cash frightens me. But I can't do anything about it. So I've got a nice place in the mountains to live out my days.
We absolutely have the data, it just isn't presented by the experts because the data directly contradicts their economic model. Whatifalthist literally covered it all in a video yesterday on YouTube
Yes. Over the course of the last 50 years we've let a series of stupid ideas slide because individually they weren't a big deal and over time they turned into an avalanche. We should have maintained a zero tolerance policy for unconstitutional ideas.
If you're looking at the current mod,: Inflation, a rise in interest rates as an attempt to slow inflation, and a rise in oil prices (double what it was 4 years ago) has an immediate effect on the average American. Inflation reduces the buying power of their wages and their savings. Wage growth lags inflation, and may never catch up. Higher interest rates make mortgages and other loans more expensive. Oil goes into the cost of everything, so any increase in the cost of oil is passed along. If you're looking over generations: Inflation and Breton-Woods / petro-dollar. Inflation destroys savings; you can't save for the house or car as well as in the past because your savings lose buying power over time. The dollar as the world's reserve currency was also a bad idea. The same idea brought down the British economy in the early 20th century. Everyone needs dollars for international trade. The only place to get dollars is the US. In order to get dollars, they sell goods at reduced cost to the US market and buy less goods from the US market. This is what people refer to as the trade deficit, though they typically blame other reasons for it.
It depends. When you say life is becoming harder for people financially, this is objectively true, but you might be referring to something other than what I am thinking. All in all, statistics such as median income (when adjusted for inflation) have not gone down drastically and are actually improving for the most part. However, so has the cost of goods, taxation/etc, so it is more expensive to live in America than it was 20 years ago. The issue becomes dramatically worse when you look at the rate of growth. Median income is barely growing at all compared to the fast growth that was witnessed around the times before the 70s and 80s. Additionally, this is happening all over the developed world. Japan, the UK, the EU, Canada. It's all a result of us trying to have our cake and eat it too. High government spending with low taxes and high regulations. We have, not by the hand of any external force, made growth via the government expensive, and growth via the private sector impossible.
As a native of Los Angeles, shit’s definitely gotten worse. Yes, I lived here through the supposed rampant gang land that was the 90’s
quality of life increases have slowed down starting with the middle class and downwards. A few generations ago even the bottom classes had major quality of life increases as time went by, think refridgerators, televisions, automobiles, microwaves, cell phones, computers. But right now, the last maybe 15 or 25 years, I think an argument can be made that it may have stopped for them. The money printers and first users are fully stealing as much purchasing power as can be had while the ignorant suffer the consequences.
There are a few issues I can think of, none of which completely answers the question but without which, pat answers like "fiat money" and "regulations" fall flat. One of these goes back to the wage-price freezes of the Nixon era - and may actually go back to the underlying causes of the Great Depression. Until that depression, the US economy worked on a boom-and-bust cycle of about every twenty years. Keeping to that history, the post-WWII boom would have led to a bust (depression or recession) in the late 1960s/early 1970s. This would have been on top of the inflation of the 1960s, which was fueled in part by the Cold War, the Space Race, and the various entitlement programs started under the Johnson administration. Nixon tried to do an end-run around this by instituting wage-price freezes (which in the end only froze wages, not prices). This pushed out the natural boom/bust cycle and may have been a factor in the stagflation of the mid-1970s. One reason for this is that everyone who lived through the Great Depression was so scared shitless of another, lesser, but natural depression that they tried to do everything they could to prevent its occurrence. The problem is, the more you try to engineer your way around a depression, the worse it's going to be when it finally hits. So... we had a bunch of smaller recessions under Ford, Reagan, Bush-père, etc. Many of these were exacerbated by the market consolidations of the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s (leveraged buyouts, mergers, and acquisitions), leading to massive unemployment, underemployment, and shifts in what jobs there are, where they're located, and what they pay... The next issue are the costs of labor and manufacturing. The invention of containerized shipping and container ships brought down the cost of transporting goods manufactured abroad, where the regulatory environment is less strict and the cost of labor is much lower. Many large businesses went international, migrated their manufacturing to lowest-cost countries and their bases of operation to lowest-taxed/lowest-regulated countries. This caused the loss of many thousands of US jobs, many of which paid their workers reasonably well (e.g., unionized auto manufacturing). One might here argue for the shift of jobs to the information economy, which sector grew slowly until the creation of local-area networking and later, the World Wide Web. As the Web became commercialized, a new sector opened up - but it was largely restricted to recent college grads. The displaced steel workers and auto workers and so on were largely stuck where they were with no place to go. Meanwhile, as the Internet grew and high-speed access became more common, tech companies realized that they could hire programmers from anywhere around the world. Many of the best-known software companies of the 1990s were headquartered in Ireland or South Africa or Russia, and chipmaking moved almost exclusively to East Asia - displacing US workers and forcing many US residents once employed in that sector to move from higher-paying jobs to those barely above minimum wage in the few customer-service positions that haven't yet been outsourced to India, the Philippines, or Latin America. Also, as the sector matured, there was less need for full-time IT positions; most of these jobs are now performed by itinerant gig workers, many of who are lucky to be paid the equivalent of minimum wage (since they are technically contractors, sub-contractors, and/or freelancers, minimum-wage laws don't apply). In many business sectors, automation has also reduced the number of available jobs. Largely these have _not_ been replaced by new jobs in other sectors (at least not in similar numbers), mainstream libertarian dogma notwithstanding. Also keep in mind that the employment/unemployment numbers are always going to be misleading. They do not count people who are underemployed (working basic, entry-level jobs even though they have years of experience, or working part-time instead of full-time, or forced to do gig work rather than a "real" job with benefits and so on), people who have been unemployed for longer than six months (who have run out of unemployment benefits), and people who have given up looking for a job because there's nothing out there for them... So: fear of a depression, the Cold War, inflation, market consolidation, globalization, sector shifts, and automation have all played factors in many Americans' inability to achieve even the shadow of a thought of "the American dream"...
President immunity. It couldn't get worse than that. It's comparable to when Hitler became Chanceller of nazi Germany.
It has never been better financially for an avg American citizen.
Whatifalthist just released a video that addresses this exact topic last night. He explains it much more eloquently than I ever could in a comment section.
I do social work and to sum it up, yes we are in worse situation then we were but we are better off then a lot of other countries. Government is to blame for a lot of this. We spend trillions of dollars on war and barely any of that on education, housing, clean water and food. Areas of the country that have had to be more self sufficient feel the draw down less then others. So the midwest has plenty of farmers and space so ppl are more heavily reliant of obtaining food through famers and/or fishing and hunting. Theyre communities are smaller and change less often so they rely on each other and take more pride in their communities. In contrast, large cities have communities that change more often so neighbors are not reliable (this affects the schools and resources), you see more homelessness and most people wouldnt know what to do if their local shops shut down. Putting it simply if there were a zombie apocalypse ppl in the city would be trying to get out quickly, where as ppl in the country would be trying to lock down their communities and resources from the outside. The government is beyond a spending problem IMO, we are so far in debt there is no coming out of it without changing the currency and what backs it entirely. The only way out is forward, which is why we continue to create war to strip other countries of resources and political power in the guise of righteousness. Our banking and political system is morally corrupt. Most religious institutions and their leaders will not be welcomed at heavens gates as they have lost their way and taken paths of greed and egotism. Our country is divided over trivial topics and does not know how to communicate in a way that both celebrates our differences and gathers us in our commonalities. The fuel is fear and we drive blindly in the dark.
The state can't go 6 trillion a year into debt without there being severe economic consequences. People should intuitively understand this is not sustainable long term. The only way they can keep the system afloat is by printing money. But every time they print money, they devalue all the already existing currency, which is the cause of the inflation we are all suffering under. That's the primary cause of all our economic woes. Everything else is a symptom.
Yes, it's pretty obvious to anyone who can remember how it was before 2000 in the west, things will only get worse as older generations die off and newer generations post 2000, those of today who are heavily brainwashed by public institutions to follow the hivemind (the collective) and think cutting of genitals is somehow natural and normal. Government is a part of this, but there are powers far larger than governments are, such as supranational institutions that can order all governments who signed for their bs, such as the EU and UN, etc. to follow their will, which is pretty much almost the entire globe, that's why they're called globalists and governments just can be seen as bureaucratic provinces of the new undemocratic elite. Positions of power have already been corrupted, most easily done in democratic countries to get your own guys in seats of power, especially in a materialistic atheistic society, even when we never had true democracy, what we got or democracy in itself where the means to get to the end game where humanity itself is the enemy, which is easily seen by the environmentalist dogmatists, i.e. the new religion of ideology not based on fact and logic, but on lies and intellectual inferiors, is self evident for anyone with a brain and is cognitive stable. This eventually will lead in to a technocratic authoritarian autocratic totalitarian world state, where there are only two classes: the elites who intermarry to keep the bloodline going and the rest, who mainly will serve no function, so you can expect a massive democide (as with all leftist governments), which I believe was already well underway post ww2 (by poisoning babies coming out of the womb, food and water supplies, the air and environment, mass immigration and potential ww3, but the changing of dna is probably sufficient in few generations from now when such people will be unable to bring forth babies). You can expect fake science, just as in ww2 where 'science' proved that some humans somehow where worse than rats take authority, hence tecnocracy (i.e. the experts) as a means of weaponization to further the twisted sick anti human ideological agendas to continue and ramp up to destroy you in every possible way you can think of (financially, freedom of movement and even your body as your own property). If you saw how people volunteered to police their peers during the plandemic, there is very little hope to turn things around and that humanity has peaked and that we're entering in a dark age that at least will last for 1000 years, I expect for at least 3500 years, if humanity still can survive, probably not, but the elites at best or all dead before than. Libertarianism and liberty in general probably will die out within 1-2 generations, inc. freedom of speech and eventually freedom of thought. Let's be honest, most people are too dumb and responsible for the shit we're going through. People were smarter in the past, despite less information directly at their disposal. You're living through the free will of humanity right now. See this excellent 2h breakdown by professor Marc @ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LyCQYfe\_\_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LyCQYfe__w)
Addendum, just quick read/skimped through the rest of the comments, they're almost all about economics and finances and are of little importance to your question... It's not about money, it's about control and the ability to force you. You can have 3 billion usd during the lockdown and your liberty was just as much limited as a poor man with just $0.01. To think the problem is government who prints money, which is factually not true, it's the private/central bank(s) (depending where you live), the gov is just an institution to enforce its will on its subjects while inflation by printing money and setting the rates is a means of incentivizing people how to live. For example, the amish don't give a shit about how much the central banks print, nor do people who are not citizens who live in the woods or jungle and anyone who already opted out and living off the land. That's the problem with libertarianism nowadays, too much focus on money and money creation, something you will never have full control of and is responsible for the enslavement of humankind, if you really wanna know the truth. The word liberty should be taken more serious, imho and it's something that will vanish not long time from here on out, inc. papermoney, but money that is programmed where, on what, with caps and expiration dates, etc. you can give out this money. This is awaiting you, so is libertarianism, which had its main focus liberty (where liberalism came from initially) -> money (now libertinism, the irony) then arguing in to eternity how to find workarounds for programmed money (probably another derivate of liberty, that long time ago already has lost its meaning)? Yeah, something to think about, because time is running out and anything money is not the solution, but at best a temporal one if you decide to move out of the west for the remaining time of your life now that you literally can buy yourself out of this shit, before it literally becomes useless outside of the scope of the elites, who will enforce what its worth will be (by aforementioned conditional variables programmed in to it). Be smart and don't waste your time like marxists do, which can be an entire lifetime of useless debates. There is a famous saying that libertarians are usually poor as mice, because they theorize too much like marxists do. Make of that what you will.
Capitalism creates wealth. States and their central banks funnel that wealth to the plutocracy and oligarchs. In turn, some people demand more socialism, which destroys even more wealth and does nothing about the fundamental problem of states and central banks.
It's the astonishing amount of wealth amassed at the top and the power of that wealth over our politics. See: https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?si=-i3NcsaCmTqUrQ63 The climate is falling apart. Home ownership is a fleeting dream to many. Considering this is a sub dedicated to people who respect property, I would hope that the ability to acquire a home of their own would be a bellwether of the overall health of the economy. Or at least the economy that I have been led to believe you would desire, as a libertarian.
The industrial revolution built the middle class, made home ownership possible for the masses, and created the American Dream of every generation doing better than the last. You can't piss away millions of jobs, and turn from a manufacturing based economy to this "Service Based" economy without repercussions.
How much of an economy "should" be manufacturing-based? What is the ideal ratio?
Short term or long term? Some things are better than they were 5 years ago. Few things are better than they were 50 years ago.
Greed and globalism.
Globalism? You mean Nationalism?
No, I am fairly certain he means Globalism. As a Ron Paul Libertarian, you should know about it.
It’s socialism. People who work full time still have all of life’s necessities. But it’s possible their rent is subsidized and they receive food assistance. And those social welfare programs allow them to be comfortable working for less. And so it keeps them renting forever and they don’t acquire wealth. They don’t buy as many things as folks did linger ago. We buy more subscriptions.