“The GoFundMe CEO hopes younger donors, who are often more values-driven, digitally native, and community-oriented, will push giving higher and faster.”
I can’t believe it. THIS is what he hopes for? He is not stating he hopes his country can get out of this mess? Or researching what his company can do? He’s just looking after his cut.
Just... wow... Thanks for the link. He did indeed! 2021 "The situation is nothing short of a national emergency. Congress should treat it as such... " And it only got worse. I'm guessing he gave up...
your framing of the question needlessly removes other possibilities.. a benefit of independent companies in an economy is that some can be machiavellian bean-counters, others can be born-again bleeding hearts, and they can make business decisions from either point of view, or many others.
The communication strategy should be to publicly hope for a thriving economy so people aren’t relying on the services for groceries but he is proud and thankful that GoFundme is there to help out in these difficult times…
We're not going to solve food insecurity when one major political party thinks it's kind of a problem but not big enough to actually do something about, and the other major political party is doing whatever they can policy-wise to increase food insecurity.
Not writing disingenuous feelgood bullshit, pretending that I work for some kind of greater good, while actually I'm pushing my own company, and trying to shift burden onto the "young digital natives". For a start.
CNBC told me the economy is doing great. My neighbor is borrowing money from me. My friend is borrowing money from me. GoFundMe is becoming more for basic needs. Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason. According to every metric BUT stonks, the economy is holding on by a thread.
It is immensely frustrating to me that to this day, after a solid century of advances in sciences and mathematical literacy, we are still implicitly stuck in the mental model of averages.
Reality is fucking far away from averages and we know it. "The economy is doing great/terrible" is an almost worthless indicator unless the person you're talking about actually has business relations into every corner.
Yes, there are interdependencies, but they do not justify that we pretend numbers are so expensive we can only print two of them (mean, sd) at a time. Let's finally stop drinking information through a 2 mile straw and instead show high resolution 2d data at least.
[edit] this is of course not a criticism of parent or OP, it's a systemic problem that we all are guilty of.
I agree with all of this. Many is time I've had to tell developers I work with: "don't just look at the mean/median, look at a graph of the full distribution!... then slice your distribution a lot of different ways by all the tags/facets you have and look again at the slices." Often you find that a shift in the mean or median was driven by one particular class of data points that skewed the whole thing. (Looking at you, NVDA.) This is usually a little lecture I give in the context of performance engineering, where it's api response times or whatever, but it applies everywhere.
At the same time - and I think you agree with this and it's probably implicit in your comment - we have to beware of anecdata as well. "Two of my friends asked me for money" means very little, except that your friend group is having a rough time. The meso-scale, your "high resolution 2d data", is where to look if you want a textured picture of what's really going on while at the same time avoiding observer bias. Unfortunately, that kind of data is not always easy to get, or to interpret.
> Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason.
- For food, this was caused by supply shocks. First COVID, then Ukraine, now tariffs and the trade war. And on top of that, excessive price-setting power in some highly concentrated sectors of the food industry.
- For housing, this was caused by a supply shortage, i.e. bad housing policy. A housing shortage gives property owners price-setting power, which allows them to keep raising the price. However, while we've made it very easy for owners to profit, we've made it harder for developers, feeding the shortage.
- For healthcare, we decided to let many middle-men profit. A decent portion of spending could be cut without harming pharmaceutical innovation or new drug development.
These problems all have causes, and the cause is bad policy that benefits a minority while harming the country. And "tax the rich and give to the poor" does not fix these; the government is gonna need to get involved in directly fixing these broken markets, not just giving money to the poor so they immediately hand it over to the existing rent-seekers.
Immigration isn't the issue. Population growth is actually down compared to historical levels. Immigration numbers (and births) are lower than they have ever been and housing costs are higher than they have ever been.
For a nation built and made immensely great by immigrants, I truly fear the type of propaganda that is able to turn all of their social and economic problems on immigrants.
I know Europe has been consumed by this rhetoric, but I feel Americans should know better, knowing their history. Incredible how the powerful can shift the blame on the guy making minimum wage, and the entire populace laps it up like complete morons. It is frightening to see the how mass media can easily brainwash a whole country in the span of a few years.
Deceiving people at global scale is by now a solved problem; despite believing we are the smartest and most well-read and rational in history, humanity as a whole is on aggregate really, really dumb.
The open not-secret has been, post-GFC and especially post-COVID, k-shaped recoveries and increasingly k-shaped economy. So it is both the best of times and the worst of times. Neither party has been remotely serious about trying to structurally fix this, which would be immensely painful to those with the most wealth and power and political influence.
We're also now fairly openly in a 21st century "Great Game" if not multipolar Thucydides Trap including ongoing proxy war, so deflationary impulses from the Eurasia to the west in energy, goods and labor have been partially choked off in various ways, leaving the working class with the double whammy of energy/goods/services inflation along with the preexisting asset price inflation.
No reason? Was it Covid, or the Ukraine war? The pandemic ground the gears, there was government help but I wonder what after-effects the flood of liquidity had, did too many people end up in the Ponzi schemes (Gamespot, trading cards, Bitcoin et al)?
The war caused energy prices to go crazy, Europe needed gas and was willing to pay a premium, and the laws of supply and demand meant the price went up for everyone.
I used to live in a country where the government subsidized the price of oil (including petrol). When they needed to cut that subsidy, people knew the price of oil would go up, and that affected the price of everything else, my reasoning was because all the trucks transporting goods needed petrol, but it's probably because everything needs energy to accomplish..
I dont think Covid or Russian invasion into Ukraine can explain price movements last two years. Covid happened years ago and Russian invasion started years ago.
Covid virus didn't make you poor, it was the government's response to it of shutting down large parts of the economy(and not others) plus printing endless money and dumping it on the market(mostly on rich people/businesses running on debt) distorting the market and creating hyper-inflation that wiped out your savings and wages.
Same with the war in Europe, they weren't forced to give up on cheap Russian gas that was the base of their economy, they voluntarily chose to do that to save Ukraine, with the obvious effect their prices would go up and standard of living would go down.
People need to start holding their elected governments accountable for their actions of putting too many thumbs, arms and legs on the economic scales that cause wealth transfer form the poor to the rich under the pretext of every crisis("never waste a good crisis"), and for the "let the peasants eat cake" response they get in return.
All the metrics (except AI-related stock prices) are worse today than a year ago.
Does the media acknowledge that? The leading cable channel and broadcast TV stations are Republican-controlled, so now they pretend “US is doing great.”
My recollection is the left leaning media was saying that inflation was finally slowing back down. And implicitly that we may have to accept that prices won't ever return to pre-COVID levels.
Not going to defend the messaging here, they really didn't do a good job. But the US was doing better than most western countries and inflation was getting lower.
Problem is, the inflation that already happened was still there. And that part is what people notice immediately.
But right now, a part of what is happening is that Trump has been blowing up parts of the economy with his tarrifs and erratic actions. The effect of that is still happening and likely will get worse.
Both depend heavily on immigrants, however, both for staffing and in the case of education for the students paying full-price tuition and effectively subsidizing everyone else.
That’s far from clear. For example, healthcare costs have risen sharply but you’d need to demonstrate that hiring foreign workers contributed to that rather than simply being a reaction to the unsustainable costs.
Similarly, in education if it was just a few prestige schools it’d be easy to believe that Harvard and Yale were hiking their base rates to exploit international students while finding credits for some of the others, but the trend is across the board even at less prestigious state schools and I’d want to see data that it’s not better explained by other factors like schools maximizing revenue from student aid.
Wherever there has been mass migration huge inflation has followed. If reverse migration was implemented inflation would lessen and quality of life would dramatically improve.
> Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong.
This sounds like something you were told by right-wing social media. It certainly isn’t what you’d have thought from the extensive discussion of that in the mainstream media or during the campaign when the candidates were talking about real problems affecting millions of people.
The closest you’d come to being factual were the pieces correctly noting that the U.S. economy was doing better than many other countries at recovering from the pandemic but that’s another way of saying “less bad”.
There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not complicated and doesn’t rely on the goodwill of ‘values-driven, digitally native, and community oriented’ young people.
We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mode.
The economy has the equivalent of a permanent memory leak. The Austrians decided to restrict the amount of memory (money). The economy crashed like a program running out of memory.
Keynes said, let the memory leak and just get more memory. This works until it doesn't, which is still a bigger win than losing multiple times.
Meanwhile Gesell said, if you want finite memory, then you must penalize memory consumption.
The amount of memory that an economy needs depends on the total number of transactions (total throughput) and how fast each processor is (sequential throughout).
Many slow processes means you need more processes in parallel, which means you need more memory.
Curiously, transactions are taxed by the government. This means that taxation minimisation implies delaying and minimizing transactions. There is an inherent bias towards being slow. It seems like tax policy is completely backwards in most countries.
Wage suppression has had a far bigger impact. Governments have lots of policies to prevent the 'wage price spiral' because they don't want the real dollar term asset distribution to change.
Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here?
The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax.
All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me.
The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.
I do not live in the UK, but across the channel.. Had to look it up a bit as I do not follow this in great detail but there is some significant debate there on inheritance taxes I believe?
I appreciate that this is a complex topic, but the point I tried to make in response was that these things are rarely as simple as people make them out to be. Increasing taxes on wealth transfers could have all sorts of side effects which are not easy to link as nothing in the economy happens in isolation. I thought the UK was perhaps a relevant example, as France and Sweden have been recently as well.
The economy is not a zero sum game, and the rich can get richer while the poor get richer as well. Maybe this is not a fair representation of what is going on, and I am certainly no expert on the US economy, but the whole "just tax the rich" mantra does not seem obviously true or effective to me.
I agree though that the system as a whole feels broken.. but also, because it is "small club, and we ain't in it". Wealth has a significant influence on policy...
That was blown out of all proportion, tbh; the UK used to have a tax carveout for the upper-middle-class which allows unused pension funds to be inherited tax-free, and this was in practice used as a tax avoidance mechanism, and that's going away, but it really isn't a particularly big deal in the scheme of things.
(Or there was another change to the privileged treatment of farms and family businesses, but again, you're not talking about a huge change.)
How can you be poorer than people earning less than you? Thats not how progressive tax works. Am I misunderstanding something or is UK that messed up or something?
Not how progressive tax works, but it is the reality, e.g. in The Netherlands. Once you go over certain thresholds, you lose certain benefits leading to a poverty trap in some sense where the incentives of the system do not align with the implied goals of a healthy economy.
If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60%
That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000
So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k
One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead
I bet you like the state using force to protect your stuff though, right? If someone scary sets up a tent on your front lawn because they have nowhere to live I bet you're all about using government services to enact violence.
> There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience,
Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem.
The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.
There's a question of what 'homelessness' means, there. So to take an example, Dublin counts 11,000 people as homeless, with ~120 sleeping rough. SF, a somewhat bigger city, but in the same size range, counts 8,000 people homeless... but with over 4000 sleeping rough. This is both a difference in temporary/emergency accommodation available, and a difference in definition (for instance I don't think SF counts couch surfing as homeless).
Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path.
It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
> It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
The main problem being, you can’t operate the bunker yourself. How do you ensure the non-billionaires on your staff don’t murder you and use your bunker themselves? This is assuming a catastrophe that forces a move to a bunker and changes the rules of society.
It’s an intractable problem, billionaires are reliant on the rest of us to do their bidding. That does not change in a crisis/catastrophe.
* Wealth inequality in US is clearly a big problem. But it’s typically not a big problem in the rest of the world, certainly in EU.
* If you think taxes and donations will solve the problem with people who struggle with basics, you are wrong. Again look at the world, places like France.
By most metrics we're in a recession as many of our state economies are crashing due to the psychotic tariff policy and economic decisions by the current admin. Some places are temporarily avoiding the fallout because the ramifications of breaking our ability to manufacture and import stuff is going to take months to fully hit and the rest of our economy is propped up by AI psychosis.
With the job market being the shittiest I've seen and more ladders being kicked out than ever I think this crash will end up being possibly one of the most violent ones. We might see a return to the early 1900s era of union vs corporate violence as corporations have gotten more brazen than ever to try and stop any sort of concerted effort by labor.
Buying gold and silver to get through the inevitable stock bubble pop is out of reach for normal people with normal wages and savings.
Houses and stocks got cheaper per ounce of gold last 20 years. But in terms of dollars they got way more expensive... inflation has been robbing us for more than 2 decades.
Since 1971. The world economic system became what I term financialism, where money is simply a debt instrument. The Treasury issues a debt note, in exchange for which they receive Fed Notes, and that debt obligation becomes the backing for more loans issued by the Fed to member banks. The Fed Notes handed to banks are then loaned too. Thus, debts in a single sector (if large enough) can crash the entire system.
The issue is, things that are tied to debt will go up first: housing, cars, etc. Stock inflation occurs because inflation forces people to speculate to stay ahead of the inflation rate.
To fix inflation when using a debt based currency, you’d need high interest rates (a high price of money), or you’d need the government to pay off debt which takes money out of circulation. Neither of these will happen as the politicians in power would cause serious short term pain. They all have an incentive to kick the can and hope the next guy is in power when it all falls apart.
What we are seeing now is the result of the price of money having been lower than the inflation rate for over 20 years. Effectively free money. This subtly skews the perception of risk, and therefore increases dollar velocity and drives inflation even higher.
The pain doesn't buy anything but the requisite costs of raising rates and/or cutting spending enough to allow debt pay-down would cause pain. Pain enough to sacrifice legacy, pain enough to sacrifice re-election, and pain enough to hurt lobbyists offering up that sweet lucre.
>A smarter approach is to cherry pick the best elements from every model and redesign the parts that don't serve us
There is a reason why Gesell only suggested the three core policies free money, free land and free trade. Once you have that you can cherry pick whatever you want, without any contradictions.
If you want austerity and low unemployment, high wages, low inequality and so on, the system is set up to support that.
How is that possible? Because most important thing realization of Gesell was that the system is not in equilibrium. You have to bring it into equilibrium through equilibrium encouraging policies.
The standard neoclassical framework treats the economy as if it was always in equilibrium and governments are the ones ruining equilibrium, which means you can abuse the economy and hack it and destroy it as much as you want and it will still work anyway. If anything, a neoclassical economist will even think that it will work better when it is in shambles.
So in a way, the policies that bring about equilibrium will appear as if they are a panacea. They do impossible things that people who are living in the old way of mandatory contradictions would never believe, when in reality all they did was reduce the obvious dysfunction staring down on them.
Doing Capitalism better means preventing market failures and accepting more state intervention... which i suppose the trump / republican government is doing.
Free market Capitalism is dead in the USA, winners are getting picked. Coal over solar. Who knows, perhaps it's right, but I suspect not.
In all seriousness, and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of flak for this, but at this point the Chinese do capitalism better than the US:
- Lots of small and mid-sized firms.
- Lots of cutthroat competition with resulting price pressure.
- Virtually all firms are subsidized by direct government investment to some extent, but the government doesn't pick winners.
- Red tape and barriers to entry are generally low, regulation mostly affects larger firms. (The CCP doesn't want companies getting too big for their britches, but there are too many small firms to harass, and the government doesn't want people unemployed.)
- Civil legal liability is anywhere from 10x to 1000x less of an issue. I'm not exaggerating. The courts are fast, decisions are usually reasonable, and "access to justice" costs very little.
In the US you have this scheme where barriers to entry are insanely high thanks to regulatory capture, and the courts are a weapon that large firms use against small ones, almost exclusively, as smaller companies can't afford the costs associated with litigation. This is without even getting into "winners getting picked," which is obviously a problem.
And it's not some law of reality or the goodness of the CCP or some raced based bullshit that underpins is. The US was like this too, 75yr ago.
But for several generations we've been throwing more power behind both public and private institutions that reduce the tempo of economic activity and it sure fucking shows.
“The GoFundMe CEO hopes younger donors, who are often more values-driven, digitally native, and community-oriented, will push giving higher and faster.” I can’t believe it. THIS is what he hopes for? He is not stating he hopes his country can get out of this mess? Or researching what his company can do? He’s just looking after his cut.
He already did that back in 2021: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/02/11/gofu...
He might have given up on the country at this point.
Or he might be switching sides, like every other tech and non-tech business?
Trying not to blame the GOP-controlled Congress in this time of stomp-on-the-critics politics?
What are the odds, knowing what business cares about first and foremost?
Just... wow... Thanks for the link. He did indeed! 2021 "The situation is nothing short of a national emergency. Congress should treat it as such... " And it only got worse. I'm guessing he gave up...
He hopes for what benefits him. Would you rather see him lie and say he hopes people wouldn’t use his platform to pay for groceries?
your framing of the question needlessly removes other possibilities.. a benefit of independent companies in an economy is that some can be machiavellian bean-counters, others can be born-again bleeding hearts, and they can make business decisions from either point of view, or many others.
cynicism is a pernicious emotional illness IMHO
The communication strategy should be to publicly hope for a thriving economy so people aren’t relying on the services for groceries but he is proud and thankful that GoFundme is there to help out in these difficult times…
Actually yes, exactly this. What he is saying is really disgusting.
What have you done yourself here about it? For myself, nothing.
I would imagine the HN demographic pays quite a bit in taxes, both state and federal.
One would think that in 2025, in one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, we could at least solve food insecurity.
We're not going to solve food insecurity when one major political party thinks it's kind of a problem but not big enough to actually do something about, and the other major political party is doing whatever they can policy-wise to increase food insecurity.
> I would imagine the HN demographic pays quite a bit in taxes, both state and federal.
If they are in the U.S. and wealthy, they pay relatively little. That's why the U.S. has a problem funding these things.
Vote?
So... nothing?
Oh get the fuck out with that.
Not writing disingenuous feelgood bullshit, pretending that I work for some kind of greater good, while actually I'm pushing my own company, and trying to shift burden onto the "young digital natives". For a start.
I don't know about the United States of America, but in my country it's very common to do volunteer work.
> I don't know about the United States of America, but in my country it's very common to do volunteer work.
Your business plan for America:
1. Live in an unknown country Z that's not the US, about which you don't know much.
2. Do volunteer work in Z, consisting of doing highly unknown stuff X for a secret number of minutes per year Y.
3. ...
4. Imply unknown profits for Z
5. The US implements a copy of the unknown volunteering in unknown country Z
6. ...
7. Imply enough unknown profits for the US to fix all of its unspecified problems.
Am I missing something, like known or unknown unknown?
Me neither, and same here.
> Oh get the fuck out with that.
Hey, learn how to have a nice discussion first then you can tell us about your morale compass.
CNBC told me the economy is doing great. My neighbor is borrowing money from me. My friend is borrowing money from me. GoFundMe is becoming more for basic needs. Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason. According to every metric BUT stonks, the economy is holding on by a thread.
It is immensely frustrating to me that to this day, after a solid century of advances in sciences and mathematical literacy, we are still implicitly stuck in the mental model of averages.
Reality is fucking far away from averages and we know it. "The economy is doing great/terrible" is an almost worthless indicator unless the person you're talking about actually has business relations into every corner.
Yes, there are interdependencies, but they do not justify that we pretend numbers are so expensive we can only print two of them (mean, sd) at a time. Let's finally stop drinking information through a 2 mile straw and instead show high resolution 2d data at least.
[edit] this is of course not a criticism of parent or OP, it's a systemic problem that we all are guilty of.
I agree with all of this. Many is time I've had to tell developers I work with: "don't just look at the mean/median, look at a graph of the full distribution!... then slice your distribution a lot of different ways by all the tags/facets you have and look again at the slices." Often you find that a shift in the mean or median was driven by one particular class of data points that skewed the whole thing. (Looking at you, NVDA.) This is usually a little lecture I give in the context of performance engineering, where it's api response times or whatever, but it applies everywhere.
At the same time - and I think you agree with this and it's probably implicit in your comment - we have to beware of anecdata as well. "Two of my friends asked me for money" means very little, except that your friend group is having a rough time. The meso-scale, your "high resolution 2d data", is where to look if you want a textured picture of what's really going on while at the same time avoiding observer bias. Unfortunately, that kind of data is not always easy to get, or to interpret.
> Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason.
- For food, this was caused by supply shocks. First COVID, then Ukraine, now tariffs and the trade war. And on top of that, excessive price-setting power in some highly concentrated sectors of the food industry.
- For housing, this was caused by a supply shortage, i.e. bad housing policy. A housing shortage gives property owners price-setting power, which allows them to keep raising the price. However, while we've made it very easy for owners to profit, we've made it harder for developers, feeding the shortage.
- For healthcare, we decided to let many middle-men profit. A decent portion of spending could be cut without harming pharmaceutical innovation or new drug development.
These problems all have causes, and the cause is bad policy that benefits a minority while harming the country. And "tax the rich and give to the poor" does not fix these; the government is gonna need to get involved in directly fixing these broken markets, not just giving money to the poor so they immediately hand it over to the existing rent-seekers.
[flagged]
Immigration isn't the issue. Population growth is actually down compared to historical levels. Immigration numbers (and births) are lower than they have ever been and housing costs are higher than they have ever been.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2021/january/us-po...
It was the PPP loans they gave out, and increase in every one wanting to be a housing investor thanks to social media
For a nation built and made immensely great by immigrants, I truly fear the type of propaganda that is able to turn all of their social and economic problems on immigrants.
I know Europe has been consumed by this rhetoric, but I feel Americans should know better, knowing their history. Incredible how the powerful can shift the blame on the guy making minimum wage, and the entire populace laps it up like complete morons. It is frightening to see the how mass media can easily brainwash a whole country in the span of a few years.
Deceiving people at global scale is by now a solved problem; despite believing we are the smartest and most well-read and rational in history, humanity as a whole is on aggregate really, really dumb.
Immigration is an issue only insofar as it's making it harder for the shit policy that's been peddled from going over well. It's not "the" issue.
Yeah all those... illegal immigrants... buying 500,000 dollar homes in Texas.
Nevermind they're the only people building the homes.
It's the immigrants' fault.
No wait, it's because of the queers.
Surely it's because of women.
Would you believe it's the socialists fault? Gangs? Non-Christians? Welfare Queens? China? The American People as a whole?
It's everybody else's fault except ours, the people who actually and demonstratively have power.
Please believe us.
“Even when it was the bears, I knew it was [the immigrants].” [0]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Apu_About_Nothing
The open not-secret has been, post-GFC and especially post-COVID, k-shaped recoveries and increasingly k-shaped economy. So it is both the best of times and the worst of times. Neither party has been remotely serious about trying to structurally fix this, which would be immensely painful to those with the most wealth and power and political influence.
We're also now fairly openly in a 21st century "Great Game" if not multipolar Thucydides Trap including ongoing proxy war, so deflationary impulses from the Eurasia to the west in energy, goods and labor have been partially choked off in various ways, leaving the working class with the double whammy of energy/goods/services inflation along with the preexisting asset price inflation.
I wonder who will be blamed for the reckless spending that resulted in this inflation.
While your friends and neighbors are able to borrow more money the economy is doing great. When music stops then there is a problem.
No reason? Was it Covid, or the Ukraine war? The pandemic ground the gears, there was government help but I wonder what after-effects the flood of liquidity had, did too many people end up in the Ponzi schemes (Gamespot, trading cards, Bitcoin et al)?
The war caused energy prices to go crazy, Europe needed gas and was willing to pay a premium, and the laws of supply and demand meant the price went up for everyone.
I used to live in a country where the government subsidized the price of oil (including petrol). When they needed to cut that subsidy, people knew the price of oil would go up, and that affected the price of everything else, my reasoning was because all the trucks transporting goods needed petrol, but it's probably because everything needs energy to accomplish..
I dont think Covid or Russian invasion into Ukraine can explain price movements last two years. Covid happened years ago and Russian invasion started years ago.
>No reason? Was it Covid, or the Ukraine war?
Covid virus didn't make you poor, it was the government's response to it of shutting down large parts of the economy(and not others) plus printing endless money and dumping it on the market(mostly on rich people/businesses running on debt) distorting the market and creating hyper-inflation that wiped out your savings and wages.
Same with the war in Europe, they weren't forced to give up on cheap Russian gas that was the base of their economy, they voluntarily chose to do that to save Ukraine, with the obvious effect their prices would go up and standard of living would go down.
People need to start holding their elected governments accountable for their actions of putting too many thumbs, arms and legs on the economic scales that cause wealth transfer form the poor to the rich under the pretext of every crisis("never waste a good crisis"), and for the "let the peasants eat cake" response they get in return.
Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong.
It was utterly bizzare seeing the podcasters and media just gaslight everyone that disagreed with "US is doing great" narrative.
All the metrics (except AI-related stock prices) are worse today than a year ago.
Does the media acknowledge that? The leading cable channel and broadcast TV stations are Republican-controlled, so now they pretend “US is doing great.”
I'm talking about couple of years ago, in the leadup to elections.
The election was less than 12 months ago. I know, feels like a lifetime already.
> I'm talking about couple of years ago, in the leadup to elections.
You mean November 2024? It has not even been a full single year, never mind "a couple"
Yeah, that wrong makes this wrong right.
My recollection is the left leaning media was saying that inflation was finally slowing back down. And implicitly that we may have to accept that prices won't ever return to pre-COVID levels.
Oh and bird flu can do a number on egg prices.
Not going to defend the messaging here, they really didn't do a good job. But the US was doing better than most western countries and inflation was getting lower.
Problem is, the inflation that already happened was still there. And that part is what people notice immediately.
But right now, a part of what is happening is that Trump has been blowing up parts of the economy with his tarrifs and erratic actions. The effect of that is still happening and likely will get worse.
Over the last 30 years the most inflated spending category is education and healthcare, which are arguably the least import dependent.
And housing... which also isn't import dependent, necessarily.
Both depend heavily on immigrants, however, both for staffing and in the case of education for the students paying full-price tuition and effectively subsidizing everyone else.
Immigration has only made it more expensive, as shown by the increase in both price and immigration.
That’s far from clear. For example, healthcare costs have risen sharply but you’d need to demonstrate that hiring foreign workers contributed to that rather than simply being a reaction to the unsustainable costs.
Similarly, in education if it was just a few prestige schools it’d be easy to believe that Harvard and Yale were hiking their base rates to exploit international students while finding credits for some of the others, but the trend is across the board even at less prestigious state schools and I’d want to see data that it’s not better explained by other factors like schools maximizing revenue from student aid.
Wherever there has been mass migration huge inflation has followed. If reverse migration was implemented inflation would lessen and quality of life would dramatically improve.
Do you have a citation for that?
Yes, that's exactly the gaslighting I'm talking about :)
> Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong.
This sounds like something you were told by right-wing social media. It certainly isn’t what you’d have thought from the extensive discussion of that in the mainstream media or during the campaign when the candidates were talking about real problems affecting millions of people.
The closest you’d come to being factual were the pieces correctly noting that the U.S. economy was doing better than many other countries at recovering from the pandemic but that’s another way of saying “less bad”.
We were trending in a good direction then. We are trending in a very very bad direction now.
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There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not complicated and doesn’t rely on the goodwill of ‘values-driven, digitally native, and community oriented’ young people.
We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mode.
The economy has the equivalent of a permanent memory leak. The Austrians decided to restrict the amount of memory (money). The economy crashed like a program running out of memory.
Keynes said, let the memory leak and just get more memory. This works until it doesn't, which is still a bigger win than losing multiple times.
Meanwhile Gesell said, if you want finite memory, then you must penalize memory consumption.
The amount of memory that an economy needs depends on the total number of transactions (total throughput) and how fast each processor is (sequential throughout).
Many slow processes means you need more processes in parallel, which means you need more memory.
Curiously, transactions are taxed by the government. This means that taxation minimisation implies delaying and minimizing transactions. There is an inherent bias towards being slow. It seems like tax policy is completely backwards in most countries.
Wage suppression has had a far bigger impact. Governments have lots of policies to prevent the 'wage price spiral' because they don't want the real dollar term asset distribution to change.
It's almost like crowd-sourcing, while being more consistent, democratic and fair.
As long as we're discussing it on this level, why tax transfers of wealth instead of wealth itself?
It's a method, for sure, but not a fail-safe one nor the only one. There seems to be an active experiment going on in the UK right now.
Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here?
The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax.
All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me.
The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.
I do not live in the UK, but across the channel.. Had to look it up a bit as I do not follow this in great detail but there is some significant debate there on inheritance taxes I believe?
I appreciate that this is a complex topic, but the point I tried to make in response was that these things are rarely as simple as people make them out to be. Increasing taxes on wealth transfers could have all sorts of side effects which are not easy to link as nothing in the economy happens in isolation. I thought the UK was perhaps a relevant example, as France and Sweden have been recently as well.
The economy is not a zero sum game, and the rich can get richer while the poor get richer as well. Maybe this is not a fair representation of what is going on, and I am certainly no expert on the US economy, but the whole "just tax the rich" mantra does not seem obviously true or effective to me.
I agree though that the system as a whole feels broken.. but also, because it is "small club, and we ain't in it". Wealth has a significant influence on policy...
That was blown out of all proportion, tbh; the UK used to have a tax carveout for the upper-middle-class which allows unused pension funds to be inherited tax-free, and this was in practice used as a tax avoidance mechanism, and that's going away, but it really isn't a particularly big deal in the scheme of things.
(Or there was another change to the privileged treatment of farms and family businesses, but again, you're not talking about a huge change.)
How can you be poorer than people earning less than you? Thats not how progressive tax works. Am I misunderstanding something or is UK that messed up or something?
Not how progressive tax works, but it is the reality, e.g. in The Netherlands. Once you go over certain thresholds, you lose certain benefits leading to a poverty trap in some sense where the incentives of the system do not align with the implied goals of a healthy economy.
Yes, it’s similar in the UK.
If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60%
That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000
So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k
One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead
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Do you consider all taxes to be theft?
If the “victim” is a large corporation is almost certainly does
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I bet you like the state using force to protect your stuff though, right? If someone scary sets up a tent on your front lawn because they have nowhere to live I bet you're all about using government services to enact violence.
Most high tax states and areas don't help individual landowners with problems like that, ironically enough.
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Inheritance tax should be 100%; taxation isn’t theft, excess riches are.
State thugs are much less a threat than private ones. The difference between organized crime and large corporations is just branding.
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This method has problems too. There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, overall is not doing well.
> There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience,
Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem.
The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.
There's a question of what 'homelessness' means, there. So to take an example, Dublin counts 11,000 people as homeless, with ~120 sleeping rough. SF, a somewhat bigger city, but in the same size range, counts 8,000 people homeless... but with over 4000 sleeping rough. This is both a difference in temporary/emergency accommodation available, and a difference in definition (for instance I don't think SF counts couch surfing as homeless).
Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path.
It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
> It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
The main problem being, you can’t operate the bunker yourself. How do you ensure the non-billionaires on your staff don’t murder you and use your bunker themselves? This is assuming a catastrophe that forces a move to a bunker and changes the rules of society.
It’s an intractable problem, billionaires are reliant on the rest of us to do their bidding. That does not change in a crisis/catastrophe.
* Wealth inequality in US is clearly a big problem. But it’s typically not a big problem in the rest of the world, certainly in EU.
* If you think taxes and donations will solve the problem with people who struggle with basics, you are wrong. Again look at the world, places like France.
Life imitates art.
GoFundMe CEO: We Could Use A Few Fun Ones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIsXEkR5OVs
By most metrics we're in a recession as many of our state economies are crashing due to the psychotic tariff policy and economic decisions by the current admin. Some places are temporarily avoiding the fallout because the ramifications of breaking our ability to manufacture and import stuff is going to take months to fully hit and the rest of our economy is propped up by AI psychosis.
With the job market being the shittiest I've seen and more ladders being kicked out than ever I think this crash will end up being possibly one of the most violent ones. We might see a return to the early 1900s era of union vs corporate violence as corporations have gotten more brazen than ever to try and stop any sort of concerted effort by labor.
At the same time millionairs and billionairs are doing just great.
Buying gold and silver to get through the inevitable stock bubble pop is out of reach for normal people with normal wages and savings.
Houses and stocks got cheaper per ounce of gold last 20 years. But in terms of dollars they got way more expensive... inflation has been robbing us for more than 2 decades.
Since 1971. The world economic system became what I term financialism, where money is simply a debt instrument. The Treasury issues a debt note, in exchange for which they receive Fed Notes, and that debt obligation becomes the backing for more loans issued by the Fed to member banks. The Fed Notes handed to banks are then loaned too. Thus, debts in a single sector (if large enough) can crash the entire system.
The issue is, things that are tied to debt will go up first: housing, cars, etc. Stock inflation occurs because inflation forces people to speculate to stay ahead of the inflation rate.
To fix inflation when using a debt based currency, you’d need high interest rates (a high price of money), or you’d need the government to pay off debt which takes money out of circulation. Neither of these will happen as the politicians in power would cause serious short term pain. They all have an incentive to kick the can and hope the next guy is in power when it all falls apart.
What we are seeing now is the result of the price of money having been lower than the inflation rate for over 20 years. Effectively free money. This subtly skews the perception of risk, and therefore increases dollar velocity and drives inflation even higher.
I disagree with the statement that politicians are averse to short term pain or even long term pain. Trump certainly doesn't seem to mind.
Pain doesn't buy anything, by the way.
The pain doesn't buy anything but the requisite costs of raising rates and/or cutting spending enough to allow debt pay-down would cause pain. Pain enough to sacrifice legacy, pain enough to sacrifice re-election, and pain enough to hurt lobbyists offering up that sweet lucre.
Rent is too damn high.
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Capitalism
Still better than the alternatives
Pledging blind allegiance to a single system is stupid
A smarter approach is to cherry pick the best elements from every model and redesign the parts that don't serve us
Not everything should be for profit, if you don't value society and collective welfare, it's meaningless:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/2...
You'll be forced to rethink that model anyway once post-scarcity hits
Abundance breaks capitalism, profit cannot thrive when there's plenty for everyone
Capitalism is a dead end, don't get too attached to it, it served us well, time to move on
>A smarter approach is to cherry pick the best elements from every model and redesign the parts that don't serve us
There is a reason why Gesell only suggested the three core policies free money, free land and free trade. Once you have that you can cherry pick whatever you want, without any contradictions.
If you want austerity and low unemployment, high wages, low inequality and so on, the system is set up to support that.
How is that possible? Because most important thing realization of Gesell was that the system is not in equilibrium. You have to bring it into equilibrium through equilibrium encouraging policies.
The standard neoclassical framework treats the economy as if it was always in equilibrium and governments are the ones ruining equilibrium, which means you can abuse the economy and hack it and destroy it as much as you want and it will still work anyway. If anything, a neoclassical economist will even think that it will work better when it is in shambles.
So in a way, the policies that bring about equilibrium will appear as if they are a panacea. They do impossible things that people who are living in the old way of mandatory contradictions would never believe, when in reality all they did was reduce the obvious dysfunction staring down on them.
Doing Capitalism better means preventing market failures and accepting more state intervention... which i suppose the trump / republican government is doing.
Free market Capitalism is dead in the USA, winners are getting picked. Coal over solar. Who knows, perhaps it's right, but I suspect not.
In all seriousness, and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of flak for this, but at this point the Chinese do capitalism better than the US:
- Lots of small and mid-sized firms.
- Lots of cutthroat competition with resulting price pressure.
- Virtually all firms are subsidized by direct government investment to some extent, but the government doesn't pick winners.
- Red tape and barriers to entry are generally low, regulation mostly affects larger firms. (The CCP doesn't want companies getting too big for their britches, but there are too many small firms to harass, and the government doesn't want people unemployed.)
- Civil legal liability is anywhere from 10x to 1000x less of an issue. I'm not exaggerating. The courts are fast, decisions are usually reasonable, and "access to justice" costs very little.
In the US you have this scheme where barriers to entry are insanely high thanks to regulatory capture, and the courts are a weapon that large firms use against small ones, almost exclusively, as smaller companies can't afford the costs associated with litigation. This is without even getting into "winners getting picked," which is obviously a problem.
This. All this.
And it's not some law of reality or the goodness of the CCP or some raced based bullshit that underpins is. The US was like this too, 75yr ago.
But for several generations we've been throwing more power behind both public and private institutions that reduce the tempo of economic activity and it sure fucking shows.
This is imaginary China.
In real China winners get picked by networks of ccp members, to profit from them.
You might more accurately call it an incentive for success of enterprises, so that the networks can get their spoils.
It's not the state driving it. It's the party networks.
And it's not pretty. They can expropriate via cancelled licenses if you don't play along. Etc..
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