When no one can afford to live in America anymore

The Campbells soup example shows precisely why inflation can't be based on a single product, and why the Bureau of Labor Statistics employs a bunch of professionals to figure this issue out. If you measured inflation by the cost of a 60" television, you'd see a very different (and equally useless) chart.

The new car price chart says in tiny text "not adjusted for inflation".

At that point, I figured the rest of the article was likely to include similarly glaring methodology problems.

This jumps from anecdata to cherry-picked stats to really speculative predictions. Some of them may be right, and there can be a real problem, but this is not well argued or thought through.

One could take several of these wild predictions and flip them the other way. The author says military strength will decay due to poor quality recruits. You could also imagine that a job that comes with housing, food, health care and eventually access to higher education would be more desirable, and the military could have its pick of better recruits. The author says we'll put in place a wealth tax ... but in an era where savings already lose their value from the higher inflation also predicted, one might expect that putting a wealth tax into effect would be politically more difficult than in a lower inflation environment (ie savers are already being taxed). Etc etc.

Article starts off with "printing too much money" and doesn't address the quoted rant about housing prices.

Housing prices are the key to cost of living and have gotten really bad in so many places.

There's nothing that complicated about this: we should build more housing, and especially legalize denser, more environmentally friendly housing where there's a market fort it, rather than just do "cheap via sprawl".

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing... - "Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes."

One thing I don't understand is why housing prices are not falling. When you are a landlord and the home doesn't rent, my first instinct would be to lower the price until people start showing up, yet this doesn't appear to be happening. Even the opposite, landlords would rather kick someone out that can't afford a hike in rent prices than to keep prices at the same level. To me it seems better to have a lower income occupied property than a high income but non-occupied property (effectively making the income 0, and with upkeep cost making it a net expense). Maybe there's some kind of mechanism I don't see because I'm not a landlord myself. How do landlords get the money to bridge the periods their properties are vacant?

My takeaway from the article is that inflation is the root of all evil in the American economy right now and we're doomed. Which ignores the fact that we've been through bouts of inflation before and so have other countries. It doesn't explain why certain goods and services (housing, education, healthcare) have grown in cost much greater than others. That differentiated price growth is not explained away by inflation.

This article puts blame on government spending, but the problem is with unbalanced accumulation. Money can either flow in accumulative or distributive flows. It can pool or diffuse.

In order for the markets to function people need to be able to participate in them, which means people need an adequate supply of freely spendable money. How can money get to people? People with money need to give money to people without money. Without strings attached. That's the only way for people without money to get money that they're able to spend freely, is by getting it from the people or institutions that have money, no strings attached.

If wealthy people hoard money, for example if they hoard the entire money supply to the extent that everyone else is too sunk to participate in the markets, something's gonna give. There will eventually be a crisis in demand, a point where _people and organizations can no longer afford to participate_. They might not even be able to afford to get their basic needs met, to function or survive.

Without demurrage and/or adequate taxes on people/orgs with the most money, the only choice the government has to distribute money is lower the interest rate and hope that public institutions are finding excuses to give it to people ("jobs"). And then there is no way to deal with the ensuing inflation other than to whipsaw the other direction and constrict the money supply.

From my point of view the forces of accumulation and distribution need to be in balance. Currently they are not. It's not because of "the deficit". It's because we have inadequate tools for dealing with the hyperaccumulation, whether they be cultural practices or government tools.

Currency ought to be a collective good. If it's not serving coordination it's serving coordination failure.

> 6) Morality will degrade. Prostitution, drug use, nihilism, and degeneracy of every sort will explode.

> 7) America’s military will weaken dramatically as the quality of recruits plunges and we no longer have the money to properly maintain and supply our forces.

Tried and true right-wing media strategy: sucker people by talking about economic stress on the middle class (real issue), and gradually transition to moral hand-wringing and pumping the military-industrial complex (fake issues).

> 12) The government will institute a wealth tax. It will be sold as something to target the rich, but in practice, over time, they will be taking large amounts of money from people no one considers rich.

Interesting that they start by talking about how Campbell's soup is expensive and finish by talking about how the real threat is a wealth tax...

Just an awful article all around with no coherent points whatsoever. The framing is basically set up for a listicle, but the items also make no sense.

What changed in the 1970s to go from flat prices to uponly?

the first paragraph has strong get off my lawn vibes. nope.