I know, hard to imagine now but a few years ago it really was a popular theory that wage inflation would exceed price inflation - the continuing rise in tech salaries being the case in point. A belief often held by those with unserviceable student loans that they would rather inflate away. Plus the whole MMT thing which was disturbingly close to becoming official policy is predicated on inflation being hard to start allowing for large amounts of consequence free debt monetization (money printing). My argument was that inflation only appears hard to start because when there is a speculative bubble reducing money velocity at the same time. Mathematically it is impossible to maintain such bubbles forever even if they can last for a very long time. BlackRock will just keep getting bigger until it implodes and disappears taking peoples pension funds with it. How long will that take, I don’t know could be decades, I may not even live long enough to see it. But there is a limit and it will be reached.

The USSR lasted a rather long time despite how dysfunctional it was, and when it disappeared and defaulted on it's obligations the result was a mad scramble and mass poverty. But it also wasn't the end of the world as the prior dysfunctions meant that opportunities still existed.

I wonder if the USSR had not collapsed when it did if they could have possibly afforded to pay old age pensions or the equivalent in lifestyle in the bargain that was made with communism. I.e. how much of Soviet wealth was from people paying in to the system for obligations that the same system could not possibly keep. And is the US Social Security system in a similar state. I think the communists had the idea that upon sufficient revolution money would no longer be needed so state care would effectively be 'free' and or paid for out of the new wealth from finally achieving a communistic utopia. I see this as equivalently fanciful to the US finding a spare $70+ trillion dollars to fund it's currently unfunded obligations.