machinebun

Deflation benefits those with savings and fixed-income and inflation benefits those with a large amount of loans - as well as making government debt easier to repay (at the expense of those with savings, treasury bonds and holders of government debt).

If you have deflation together with a large debt bubble (like we have now), many people & companies will have to default. Not saying it's good or bad, but politically that kind of pain is intolerable (the politicians who support it would get voted out)

> Inflation is so low right now because the Fed is artificially forcing low interest rates. Dollars in circulation has little impact on it.

Inflation in the short term has more to do with elasticity of supply than demand (unless demand spikes hugely). Low interest rates don't have much to do with it (low rates are usually a tool to stimulate demand, but they only work when you don't have a pre-existing debt bubble that must be deleveraged).

> The top 300 biggest cities in the US are home to only ~20% of the population.

I think it's actually 20% for the top 100 cities; but a total of 62.5% of the population actually live in cities (82% live in urban areas - due to increase to 89% by 2050)

https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/100-biggest-cities-have-...

1) Neither houses nor stocks actually qualify for hyperinflation (50%+ rise per month); crypto is the only one that potentially could, though again, hyperinflation is generally not a concept applied to assets - it's specifically for consumption goods. If hypothetically the U.S. government announced that they are banning cryptos tomorrow and the value crashes, what happens to your hyperinflation?

(The FED has the lever to control "inflation" - or rather asset price appreciation in all three of the above by controlling the interest rate and rate of bond purchases, so talking about inflation in them is kind of useless. The FED could crash all three markets (stocks, crypto & housing) tomorrow if they wanted to)

I can live my life just fine without owning a house, stocks or crypto, and in fact many people do.

> Other business loans are tax-deductible because we have a tax system based on net income.

I want to make a distinction between productive use of capital and rent-seeking. If you're getting a loan in order to buy an existing piece of property and rent it out - that is not productive, it is rent seeking (since you generate cash flow from just holding onto an asset and not doing anything with it).

If you're building a new house or renovating/repairing the existing house with that loan, then the part that goes towards building/renovation is productive and the interest on that part of the loan should be deductible.

The point is that people can make a lot of money by buying up real estate "portfolios" and simply sitting on them to generate cashflow, pricing others who want to buy a home out of the market. This would even out the balance a bit and make holding onto lots of investment assets more expensive but buying your first home [relatively] more affordable.

We don't have to have government take over housing, just relax the zoning regulation. The damn real estate owner's association has too much power - if we curb some of it, I will have no problem with privately owned real estate.

Remove the carveouts against money laundering for real estate, the preferential tax treatment / mortgage interest deductibility for investment properties, things like that.

Labor used to be directly related to our ability to feed ourselves (when everyone was a farmer / hunter gatherer). No work = no eat.

Nowadays, we have more productivity as a species if we do specific labor instead in order to feed ourselves, but the premise is the same. No work = no eat (at least until you have enough savings/investments to afford not to work). At least until theoretically automation takes all of the jobs.

Let me remind you, in case you forgot, that the Muslim ban EO happened 7 days into Trump's tenure (as well as shithole countries remark). That's about all the "chance" I was prepared to give.

If that's how you lead foreign policy 7 days in, you don't deserve to be president. Full stop.

Yes, but he can live on a cheap loan collateralized by his stocks and never sell - that way he pays no tax)

> It's like every single meaningful metrics are going down

Except somehow life expectancy is the highest ever (excluding a small spike down lately in USA).

Plus we took lead out of houses and gasoline, and smoking rates are down across the world... this should not be under-estimated.

The young generation right now is actually likely one of the healthiest comparatively (even with the increased obesity rates)

There is a 7% employer contribution that does not show up on your payslip (as well as the 7% that does). Also the employer contribution to your health insurance does not show up but your part of it does.

Looking from the company perspective, it would likely be 20% of the fully loaded cost for an employee (of which pay is just a part) - I think fully loaded cost can be closer to 1.5x pay in some cases, so maybe 80% time for 70% pay makes more sense.

True, but when you own a part of Apple you also have to have faith that your shares won't be diluted to nothing via new stock offerings (which numerous companies have done in the past). So while there is intrinsic value in the shares, some of that is still based on faith (if Apple doubled their outstanding shares overnight, the value of yours would go down).

Tell that to landowners in 1917 Russia :)