

Why the poor can have “things” but can't escape poverty - vostrocity
http://moorewr.tumblr.com/post/121516007260/monkeymancheeks-antigovernmentextremist

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dsfyu404ed
New/used vehicle costs have certainly not decreased (although the gap has
shrunk a lot). Anyone with even casual knowledge of the used car market should
be able to tell you that.

Cell phone service has not gotten less expensive (maybe in terms of bytes/$,
but certainly not in cost/time).

Cars and education share the common problem of easy money (via loans) creates
a situation where there is too much money chasing too few goods. It's easy for
prices to climb when there is no immediate impact on the buyer, if they want
the product (in this case both of which are near essentials for a typical
white-collar existence) they just take on more debt.

In short, there's two lines on that graph I 100% call BS on, either for being
straight up false or the product of number crunching "creativity". Do I trust
the rest of them? Hell no.

~~~
meric
You've gotten more data now than 10 years ago - to the central bank that
counts as a price decrease after hedonic adjustment due to the quality
increase. Used cars now have more electronics and are safer and, so, the same
thing applies.

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meric
The currency will be set to inflate at 0-3%, hedonically adjusted, by central
banks. This rate is determined by averaging out costs of a consumer basket of
goods, as determined by a central bank. The bank might determine a family only
needs to spend 6% budget on college and 20% TVs. The currency will inflate
accordingly. This policy benefits those who hold assets that increase in
nominal value, as well as those who can access near 0% interest loans.

~~~
mindslight
It's even worse when you take into account that technological goods are
naturally subject to strong price deflation, so the explicit policy is for
everything else in the average to rise. And that's still ignoring that slight
price deflation is the inherent to market competition itself.

We're getting ever more productive, but the debt puppeteers insist on turning
up the treadmill ever higher.

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cbhl
Source:
[https://twitter.com/markmellman/status/462951610042564608](https://twitter.com/markmellman/status/462951610042564608)

Note that the x-axis spans the years 2005-2014, and that the y-axis is
somewhat misleading ("changes in prices relative to a 23% increase").

