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Comment by AlanSE | Hacker News Reader

Inflation is always permanent.

There’s a difference between inflation and a price hike within one industry

Of course inflation is permanent. The mechanics of money would break down otherwise. When money can deflate, money becomes an investment vehicle like crypto did and we know how bad that is.

When there is a threat of inflation, it forces people to transfer money instead of hoarding it. That is the entire purpose of money.

Now, about the price hike… is it permanent? Probably not when there are 160,000 competing poultry farms.

Not just the competition between poultry farms either, but competition with any other protein a person can eat. The closer eggs gets in price per calorie to meat (or nuts, cheese, etc), the less people are likely to choose eggs. There’s plenty of food out there, and a large part of the historic popularity of eggs has been their cheap price.

U.S. has had periods of deflation: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-i... . As recently as 2009.

Down 0.4 - after a 3.8% rise the year previous.

Not exactly the strongest counterexample I've ever seen, though (barely) technically correct.

And the last deflationary "period" (a single year) before that was ... drumroll... 1949, following 3 years of >8% inflation.

It's called the ratchet effect. The government doesn't like giving your money back. That's why taxes almost never go down, either - e.g. the "temporary" income tax that only affects the richest 1% of people..

Federal Receipts as Percent of Gross Domestic Product : https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Yes. Share ~ steady, but GDP growing - tax income growing.

Taxes have been going down consistently for 50 years in the US.

what

Both the marginal [0] and effective [1] tax rates have been trending downwards since WW2 with relatively little deviation from that. Pus this doesn't take into account all the ways wealthy people can avoid creating taxable income in the first place that generally aren't possible at lower income levels.

0. https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-bracke...

1. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-...

"For the top 1%"

On average, aka the vast majority of tax revenue, it's stayed constant according to your own source.

Means I'm gonna have to interview prep hard next year to jump ship to a better paying company if I can and if the market allows for it, as my current one isn't in a hurry to do any salary adjustments and it hurts.

Food, electricity, heating, all went up from minimum 30% to nearly doubled. Luckily my rent and doctor's bills went up only 10% so thank God about that.

I'm in the process right now of changing jobs for the same reason. The company has been losing employees left and right because of this.

Not for commodities. Their prices fluctuate like wild.

'always permanent' seems redundant. Japan certainly has not had permanent inflation. Starting in the mid-1980 up until recently it has wavered quite a bit.

Tell that to my bike tires.

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