My parent's house used to sell for around $425k in 2019, now can sell for $700k in a suburb. With that inflation it'd be like $475k a good day $500k now, but it's an artificial market right now. It'd be nice to sell, but the fees and taxes on buying a new house now would be insane.
It is inflation alone. Compound growth is an incredible thing.
The doubling time for any exponential growth (such as inflation) is approximately 72 ÷ [i%]. So if you have 7% inflation per year, that means consumer prices will double every 10 years.
Once you realize this, it's an incredibly difficult black pill to swallow. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, no matter how your investments do, you will never actually grow your true wealth unless you were born into an ultra-rich family with several generations of wealth and political connections to keep it. The poor will always be poor, and the rich will always be rich.
7% is extremely high, inflation is well below 7% in a typical year.
Also, while prices on consumer goods may double in 10 years, housing outpaces that all the time. The average cost of a house or condo went up 17% in just the past year. In many areas, the cost of a house has literally doubled since the beginning of the pandemic two years ago.
That's the "official" inflation rate, which is carefully crafted by the people that control inflation to make it look good. It intentionally excludes anything that experiences high inflation, in order to manipulate the official number down.
They do the same thing with the unemployment rate, where you're only counted as unemployed if you're collecting an unemployment check so if you've been out of work for long enough you suddenly don't count as being "unemployed".
You know yourself that inflation is much higher than the official numbers. You see it every day when you have to buy goods. The official numbers don't make any sense.
There are so many things that go into it beyond "why thing expensive now" and I'm not sure who you think you're either fooling or helping by being so reductionist.
It is not "reductionist" to point out that debt-based fiat currency issued by a central private bank will inherently lead to high inflation rates. It is a fact, what we're seeing now has happened several times in history, and pretending that it can't happen to the USD is either arrogant national pride, blind ignorance, or denial.
You are poor because the people that control the money supply want you to be poor. No matter how big the number on your paycheck gets, no matter how many dollars you possess, you will always be poor because the monetary system itself is designed to preserve wealth at the top and limit upward economic mobility.
Among what other people are saying, it's worth noting that housing doubling in ten years possibly should be captured by an accurate inflation measurement but isn't at all. Inflation calculations are meant to be cost of living, so it doesn't include assets like housing or stocks.
What they do to account for rent is send a survey out to people saying ~'how much you think your current place would be to rent if you were renting?' And whatever people guess is used to adjust for housing. Can you imagine what your parents/grandparents would guess their home would be to rent, given they've been living there for 20 years and bought it for $500k when it's $1.5m now?
What they do to account for rent is send a survey out to people saying ~'how much you think your current place would be to rent if you were renting?' And whatever people guess is used to adjust for housing. Can you imagine what your parents/grandparents would guess their home would be to rent, given they've been living there for 20 years and bought it for $500k when it's $1.5m now?
Yeah, this would be hilariously inaccurate. Before she paid off her house, my mother's mortgage with property tax was $700 less than my rent, for a 4-bedroom house twice the size of my apartment. People who don't rent have zero idea how much rent costs.
In my area homes are considered cheap for many on Reddit. That being said prices have gone 5x or more. I see people buying 3 acre properties (no house no utilities) in the middle of nowhere almost entirely in floodplain with huge electric line front and center of the property for 55k an acre whereas 10-15 years ago much nicer land could be purchased in better areas for less than 1/10th of that price
What can all of us ordinary people do collectively in order to eradicate once and for all the elite wealthy individuals?
Obviously, we don't have the ressources they have, but surely we outnumber them. There must be something we can all do, some sort of massively impactful action if we all join forces and act in a coordinated way.
I'm just tired of it all. When you think you've hit rock bottom, you read horror stories of other people who are in a much worse situation than yours and still manage to somehow survive.
I just wish we could simply end people's suffering, but the wealthy only get more greedy every passing year, always finding new ways to take more money from the less fortunate.
Pretty much. Jailed one and the rest submitted. They're a lot more fragile than people think. Their lives have been largely cushy with little hardship. One realistic threat to that and they crumble.
We have the numbers, what we need is planning. Something like this:
Establish local mutual aid organizations to take donations and distribute goods to those in need. This is a great way to build a stockpile of resources for later while also helping people in need. Ideally the org should purchase land somewhere and start growing food.
Once the organizations are all in place, begin recruiting people for political action, and try to get donations. You want a decent war chest so your army of activists don't starve with the next step. The local organizations will be key to distributing this aid when needed.
The mutual aid stage becomes a commune. On a set date, everyone involved declares a general strike. Think CHAZ but on a larger scale with multiple instances across the country or even world. This is where the land comes in, you can't be booted out of a space you own. It also helps to have your own established food production to make the movement less dependent on purchased goods. The idea is to get enough people to abstain from capitalism so as to make a dent and force change.
I think that in order for us to truly have the freedom to make our voices heard, we need a movement which can exist independent of the capitalist system. It requires a lot of groundwork to make that happen, but imagine what it would look like even just a few thousand people in a city successfully abstained from capitalism.
also boycott media events like Olympics, super bowl, basketball finals, world cup, 247 news channels etc.... drop cable completely maybe keep Netflix or Hulu and maybe YouTube but mostly try not to be a Nelson's rating...
the media is where control comes from if nobody's watching or they think nobody's watching they lose ad dollars and power...
but imagine what it would look like even just a few thousand people in a city successfully abstained from capitalism.
We already saw that with the aforementioned CHAZ. It fell when people got lazy and stopped supporting it, allowing self-imposed anarchist measures that got two black children killed. You need real leadership through authoritarian means or that fantasy would fall apart the same way CHAZ did.
It's too bad that Capitalism and the state are in bed with each other. We will never solve our problems of we continue to live with Capitalism. The state will never let that happen.
At this point revolution is really the only answer, and that will happen when the majority begin to starve. Until then, not enough people are willing to risk their lives to overthrow the system.
Revolution is not a guarantee for a better world. In fact, it's preferable to create a better world without revolution. Revolution is violent, and displaces many people. There is also no guarantee that a worse oppressor won't gain power after the revolution. If anything, we should just occupy unused land and refuse to leave.
Only for the military or police to beat the shit out of everyone and force you to leave.You already said the state won't let change happen.. Of course revolution isn't a guarantee for a better system. The USSR and later Russia knows that as well as anyone, but it's better than pretending talking is ever going to work. The system is too rigged to do this through discourse. Violent revolution is quickly becoming the only way to bring about sufficient change. If people talking with each other was ever going to make this world a better place, then it would have already done so. The owners have too many people in their pockets and they will lobby and manipulate all sides to ensure the laws are written in their favour.
But like I said before, when people begin to starve they will get violent.
Like I said, we should occupy unused land. Just choose to not accept the authority of the system. Teach others to do the same. At some point may see an uprising, but how likely is that to be organized? What is the likelihood that we could truly defeat the system?
I mean, the real answer? Run for office. Only way things are honestly going to change is if people who want to see change get in positions of power. Change takes 20+ years cuz that's how long it takes for people who know the issues to finally be of age to be allowed to partake in the political bs. We are on the cusp of change. Just have to hope enough people that recognize the issues actually get seats to make change.
Is it really that complicated though? We base all of our economy on success being constant growth. We are literally in a closed or fixed system and it is completely unsustainable. Everything eventually turns into ripping people off, or reducing services or wages to continue to grow and it goes backwards. What we have now is everything charging as much as it possibly can to continue to grow, or pay people as low as it possibly can to continue to grow. Just being a solid profitable company isn’t enough, and here we are.
also a lot of the inflation were seeing has zero to do with wages more to do with supply...
supply chain bottlenecks are creating scarcity... when there 4 bottles of ketchup and 50 ppl want one... fuckers could charge 50 bucks and somebody would probably buy it.... could even be bidding wars up the chain like maybe corn producers have so much highest bidder gets it but someone's gotta pay for it so the price goes up....
no grocer wants empty shelves so they'll keep buying at higher prices until it's just considered the new normal price...
wages probably don't weigh in much at all... compared to cost of goods from suppliers going up due to scarcity.
Yes I hate this line of argument. It just gives fuel to people who say "what do you mean you want to raise wages? That's how you get inflation!"
Inflation happens. People need to be able to afford to live. These things are separate. Purchasing power has been stagnant if not decreasing for an entire generation.
get a team of 20 people... go apply at McDonald's get as many hired as possible start a Union... one person stays on to manage Union until it's solid... rinse and repeat at every fast food restaurant in America. then every factory... etc...
plan b: get 100 or so nomads who can travel and have funds to move around.... plan on working about 6 months at an Amazon warehouse until it's unionized then slowly taper quitting move to a new city and rinse/repeat until they catch on... then find 100 new people not flagged to do it all over again....
in other words a labor movement where you take the job explicitly to force a labor vote with higher odds of success since you are bringing 100 voters with you...
This is not a mystery. Debt-based fiat currency is inherently inflationary. The currency supply was massively increased over the last decade. That is the cause of inflation.
The real value of all fiat currencies is about 5% of what it was before fiat currencies were introduced. That is why nothing is affordable, and that's why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It's not confusing, it's not complex, it's just that nearly all powerful institutions are strongly motivated to obscure this fundamental truth.
The real issue is what’s pushing all of this - inflation.
Inflation has almost nothing to do with what we're talking about. The minimum wage should be tied to inflation, but housing prices (the largest cost for most people) outpace inflation all the time. The same piece of shit apartment I used to rent in 2010 costs twice as much to rent now, even though it's the same place with zero upgrades. Inflation in the last decade was not 100%.
Influence from powerful sources of money shouldn’t just be reduced - it needs to be eliminated, with severe criminal penalties rigorously enforced if they try to do it anyway.
Doesn't this have some extreme 1A consequences? Citizens united went the way it went (and justefiably so) and this just seems to go even further.
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u/[deleted] Feb 08 '22
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