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Comment by wyre | Hacker News Reader

You exist in a bubble if you think a meaningful population of the target audience of this app have any meaningful amount of treasuries in their portfolio, or any portfolio at all.

I don’t think the website is lacking in describing things that we get from the government.

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An explanation of government that ignores or downplays the effects on part of the constituency wouldn’t be a very good explanation, would it? The government is by definition for everybody, not just a “target audience”.

Even if you ignore people over 65, or over whatever age it is you think people start saving any money, there are plenty of young people with disabilities receiving Medicare benefits.

Uh... do you have cash in a money market account? What do you think the "money market" is, exactly?

In the nicest way possible no absolutely not that would way underperform just about everything

Not over the last few months, obviously. But in general I've never known a serious trader who didn't maintain a cash balance at some non-trivial level, if only to maintain liquidity for low-latency bets.

But regardless, the point was that all the "cash" you see in your investment accounts (even if you, personally, don't carry any) is predominantly treasuries and other short term high-confidence debt. Everyone owns treasuries, it's only true that very few people "buy" treasury notes.

Money market is just chips on the table. The real investment is money in the pot

No, my point was that not everyone has an investment account, period.

Well, your statement was that a "meaningful population of the target audience" did not "have any meaningful amount of treasuries in their portfolio". And that's wrong. Basically everyone holds treasuries. Some people don't. Most people do.

Look it up. Half of Americans don’t own stock or investment. By any definition that is considered a “meaningful population”.

It's 62%: https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-own...

At what point does that tip to "meaningful population" for you?

You're goalpost-moving to the converse of your point, though. You weren't claiming that there was merely a meaningful population who wouldn't benefit, you were stating that there was NO meaningful population that would. Go check. And again, that's wrong.

lmao, I love the irony of this "how much could one banana cost" reply

I repeat: almost everyone has some kind of money market instrument, the cash balance of which is stored primarily in US treasuries (along with other short term debt). Almost everyone benefits, to the extent they have that asset, by interest payments from the US government.

If you want to make a point about wealth distribution, then make a point about wealth distribution. This was a subthread about government finance policy.

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