FBXL Social

Yesterday I posted a big thing talking about why nobody wants to win the next US election, but I want to make a slight correction: I wrote that "Most alarm lights that haven't had masking tape put over them by the government are screaming imminent stagflationary depression, maybe one of the worst in American History", but I think we're already in that depression and have been for a while.

If they're lying about the inflation rate (which I've written at length that they are), and it's actually been 15-20% per year and not 20% over 3 years, how would that change the way we look at the current economy? Well for one thing, it would mean that every developed country is in double digit recession and has been for years. So some might say "but employment is at record levels!" -- well, if we assume arguendo that they aren't fudging those numbers, it makes perfect sense from a market economics standpoint -- If you are a business and your labor costs are going down 15-20% per year, why not keep that labor? With the labor getting cheaper every year for the same or greater output, it's just rational decisionmaking to keep everyone working. It's the same as what libertarians have said for years about the minimum wage -- if there was no minimum wage there might be 100% employment because you'll even hire the most useless worker if it's for a dollar a year.

I think we can look at the tent cities that never existed in many communities before as evidence that things are not as rosy as the government claims. I've never seen that before in my life, and now they're everywhere.

Instead of looking at my post as talking about the economy from the viewpoint of actors who are in bed with the government. For them, the actual economy doesn't matter as much as the numbers since that's what they'll look at to discuss reality. We saw that recently when the press was attacking individuals for saying things are bad when the numbers claim otherwise -- "The numbers say you're not doing so badly!" oh well then I guess I don't live in a tent this year! Great! I'll tell the bank!

I posted a more permanent link on lotide about a year ago: https://lotide.fbxl.net/posts/32322

There's a site called shadowstats that simply takes the inflation calculation they did in 1990, and it consistently shows the inflation rate as being incredibly high. It's well-recorded that many changes were made to CPI calculations in ways that reduce CPI, such as hedonic adjustment or substitution.

https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

People living outside of places like the rust belt might disagree, but I definitely agree. The manufacturing base was getting hollowed out after that, and most of the people in today's rich areas don't realize how cataclysmic it has been for many places. A lot of cities are like ghost towns, filled with houses you can buy for less than $1,000 because the plants shut down and moved to China and the cities were left to rot. And they go "so? Who cares?" But the reality is something was lost when that heartland that was once the core of western power and it's all been globalized away.

Globalization isn't going to last forever. The world is becoming more dangerous because there isn't a superpower to keep it in check anymore, and given how much has been destroyed (including generations of workers), it's not going to be a nice process getting it back.