I am fortunate enough like most HN users to be working in tech, and although I can't speak for everyone in this field, we seem to be better off than most. Inflation's hit me hard but knock on wood if anything was to happen, I'd be okay.
However, my brother, who is just starting his career works in IT and has a $50,000~ a year salary. He lives in a Tier 3 city in Florida and the median rent for a studio there is $1,500, up from $600 five or so years ago. After taxes, car insurance, car payment, food, and a night out here and there, he barely can save anything after his student loan payments.
This is ridiculous. I can't imagine what others are facing when it comes to the cost of living crisis that is ongoing here. (And for other folks across the pond in England, it's even worse from what I hear.)
Throughout my travels of America, anecdotally, I am seeing more families making long term accommodations out of motels and we seem unwilling from our governments to even address this. I think it's going to get much worse until it gets better unfortunately...
Interest rates go up, getting a mortgage becomes less affordable -> more people in the market for renting (in many areas, there's also a lack of rental housing stock)
Professional landlords have built empires on low interest rates -> interest rates go up -> landlords pass the cost onto renters (or for smaller landlords, exit the market, potentially reducing supply further)
Rent prices in Florida were skyrocketing long before interest rates started rising. Our last rent increase before we moved was going to be around 25% back when interest rates were still 0. If anything rent increases -- in South Florida at least -- are partly a zero interest rate phenomenon. There are a ton of half full midrise luxury condos that priced lots of people out of previously affordable communities built as the result of access to cheap capitol and money laundering. There was also the massive influx of people moving into the area during covid. All that to say rent prices in Florida are the perfect example of monocausal explanations for complex phenomenon almost always being wildly incorrect.
It's insanely city-centric, because the state is literally a swamp or sun-scorched grassland.
On top of that, add a lot of foreign buyers, for various cultural, geographical, and political/economic-stability reasons (e.g. if you're a wealthy Haitian).
On top of that, add a constant stream of snowbirds [0] and retirees.
On top of that, add a huge tourist economy.
At the end, you get a housing market that's really unstable (up and down).
On average, 33% of Americans rent. So 33% of current homes are owned by investors and we'd expect to see 33% of new homes being purchased by investors.
Institutional investors are not the same as individual investors. They can sit with large portfolios of vacant units in order to maintain elevated rent rates. Individual investors typically can’t.
I find the opposite. Institutional investors hire people or companies to handle rentals. Individual investors (especially international ones) find it way too much and often just don't bother.
Reminds me of a meme where a lady is complaining that she can't approved for a mortgage and is forced to pay rent that's even higher than the mortgage would have been! Yeah, that's going to work!
I think people are starting to learn again that the point to the game of Monopoly was that once someone has cornered the housing market, everybody else goes bankrupt. Now you're just watching it in real life. It's a human tragedy, but the market doesn't care.
The rest of my post would address that point. Prohibition on institutions investing. If needed put a cap on the number of units a person can own in one jurisdiction. Housing could be for use not investment if we wanted such a policy landscape. There may be unintended consequences but it’s a worthy experiment.
What about apartment buildings built for rent only? Surely these can only be done by institutional investors, no single person has the capital to do a 100-200 unit apartment building?
There are details, of course, but just like every "housing crisis" in the past, the parameters that need adjusting are fundamentally the same.
Which way to adjust always changes. And, in part thus, always becomes the basis for the next crisis.
For example, zoning requirements were mostly positive and useful at a time when some jerk might open up a steel mill right next to my house just because I happened to live on some useful waterway and near some rail that had been built...* and, this fostered development of land that was arguably underutilized in the economic landscape of the time (... "suburbia").
Of course, as happens with markets in general (and, especially, when you produce "professional businesspeople" and have laws regarding "fiduciary responsibility"), once primary development of new markets / "opportunities" is largely exhausted, then, the less net-positive behavior starts. I.e., when you hit a degree of "market saturation". The resistance of market participants to change in what they have "staked out". So, all the NIMBY crap. Some, for reasons most might empathize with. Some, by the greediest and most psychopathic (including in "big corporate" contexts), to stop any further development simply to maximize prices of assets they "own".**
Right now, I'd say we're in a period of unusual disruption, even as disruptions go. Maybe more of a 1:50 year or even 1:100 year disruption. Changes related to the sudden significant increase in population that can potentially work from just about anywhere ... etc. Quite an upending of a relative status quo of, really, centuries ... and, of course, not having nearly as positive an impact on certain communities that formerly suffered more from people leaving than from people clamoring to move in ...
In any case, as pressure increases, changes will be made - more and more rapid and large-scale. Unfortunately, it always takes years (and will basically guaranteed set up the next "trouble(s)"). But, fundamentally - more houses, change in permitting requirements towards "lower", rebalancing (decreasing) "institutional ownership", etc.
** Own in quotes because that's a whole other area of sort of human absurdity that I'm not even going to get into - but, just interpret in whatever way you usually do
I think one of the cause is we don’t tax the landlords higher for the investment property. That’s why lot of upper middle class and HNIs have lot of investment properties around the country. It’s so easy to buy and rent out properties without even seeing them ever. One of my friend who works at Microsoft in Seattle, owns 4 properties around US(3 in WA and 1 in TX). It was so easy to get cheap mortgages between 2017-21 if you had 100-200k lying around.
Higher or lower taxes doesn't change the market rate for a given unit. If your landlord has to pay higher or lower taxes, they still can charge what the market will bear. However, increasing the supply of rental units will lower rents or at least slow the increase.
That is one instrument to deincentivizing accumulation of more than 1 property. Increasing supply is definitely another one but as I mentioned that earlier most of those rental units get acquired by richer landlords. One can also make those investment property mortgages much higher.
I fully agree, but it's a tall order given how unpopular it is both among voters and politicians. Governor of CO just tried it and every single municipal lawmaker was howling for his head. The bill some of his allies introduced to the state legislature got gutted beyond recognition and then dumped unceremoniously, and the majority of state citizens were glad for it.
I tried to go lower on the price of a house once because nobody else was bidding on it during the pandemic. The owners decided to just leave it empty and move to another country. They probably made 400k by leaving the house empty.
Every time I look at houses, I hear the same story: There's a lot of people who have been waiting to buy houses from the previous year, so there's a lot of competition now. The problem is this will always be true if there's more people looking for houses than houses.
This is not a left-right problem. The right and left will equally say we should not build housing. NIMBYism is common across the political spectrum. The most left places like New York have let the housing situation get so bad that now anyone that arrives there is instantly homeless because there is simply nowhere to live[0]. This is New York, the place everyone thinks of when you say "the land of opportunity" and the location of the statue that everyone cites whenever Trump says something about migrants.
A lot of stories I read these days I think about The Housing Theory of Everything. Why is everything so expensive? Why are employees so expensive? Why are these expensive employees not able to pay their bills? It seems like a large part of this is that we have structured our economy to pour all of our money into land. Not landowners, land. When you're working for a faang but paying a 5-10k mortgage for a condo, how rich do you really feel? How would it feel to be the ones that didn't get a place to live? How can there ever be a middle class when those that don't make above a certain amount just end up homeless?
When there is more housing than people, then people have freedom to ask for better or cheaper housing. Until then, we will be like crabs in a barrel, pulling other people down for a place to live.
Hotel California. You can check out but you can never leave. The policies of the state hollow out the middle class so you get the very rich and the desperately poor.
One would think there isn't enough land in America for people to build houses (of any type?). Or, are you going to tell me that laws made by men (and women, but mostly men) make it illegal to be housed and poor at the same time, no matter the amount of land? And, that changing the laws it's an uphill battle? I understand the concept, America is not the only country like that. But if memory serves me right, America is the result of people from Europe (and Asia, and Africa, and South America) escaping from exactly the same problem?
So, here is my proposal: build new nations people can escape to. There is Greenland[^1], Svalbard[^2], Antarctica, the Sahara[^3], the oceans, the Moon, the space habitats and Mars[^4]. We have the technology to build livable spaces[^5].
[^1]: Which is Danish, but can be rented from them for a (high) price.
[^2]: Ident, but from Norway. Rent is going to be more expensive.
[^3]: Rents and labor are cheap.
[^4]: A bad idea, even according to my client.
[^5]: Anybody who has been in Las Vegas knows that humans are perfectly adapted to live in big dens of concrete with no vegetation nor walking spaces[^6]. Anything better than that.
Spend some time looking at county zoning maps. There are huge legal barriers to developing affordable housing. Zoning, minimum offsets, covenants, height restrictions, usage limits, land use regulation, etc... If you want to re-classify some land you will need to go through extensive legal procedures and you will never get through them without HUGE amounts of capital. In addition, large swaths of land in the most popular states is owned by the federal government. All of this is in opposition to one or more of the most powerful lobbies in the United States.
There is a reason the only homes you see being built these days are massive single family homes and luxury apartments. It just isn't economical to build low income housing. If people could move to Greenland, Svalbard, Antarctica, or the Sahara they would have. But those places just don't support human life. If we used technology to make them livable, they would cost an order of magnitude more than living in California or New York.
There's a lot of comments about building more homes.
That's only part of the problem. Another part is the fact that rents are a thing. Make it unprofitable to rent and you'll find a lot fewer people forced to rent.
After capitalism comes Rentism (Feudalism 2.0): the rent economy.
The rich hoard the resources and means of production and instead of creating new value, they rent it to the rest (Landlords, etc). You'll own nothing and you will be happy.
Remember that this is a policy choice: we chose to enrich Boomers who own houses, at the expense of these people.
We could build more homes on golf courses, we could build affordable housing, we could build up, we could get rid of parking mandates. All of that would cost The Boomer, and so is forbidden.
California passed Prop 13 way back in the 70s that locked property taxes at 1% increase when nationally inflation has been 1.5-2%. It doesn't require a math degree to see that after a few years if you already own the discounts compound in just a few years. So newer, younger buyers have to shoulder the burden of paying for and providing civil services. Even when the shortcomings are pointed out it remains popular. The people that benefit from it vote to keep it in place and the ones that don't realize they'll have to move to Arizona or Nevada.
We could build homes no golf courses and it still wouldn't matter because only the rich could afford to live in them anyway.
I've heard the other side of this argument - basically the original argument focused on fixed income retirees. And I can see the logic and sympathize.
The law simply needs to be updated - though it's basically political suicide to attempt it - to only include primary residences of a certain relative value. If you have three houses and a mansion, you should be paying way more tax.
If they wanted it to apply to fixed income retirees they could have applied it to just fixed income retirees. This law applies to all land and property owners and the more you own the better you benefit. They may have used retirees to sell this scheme but it's not what was sold.
BTW many other states have Homestead Exemption that only applies to homeowners, retirees, widows, or veterans. Unlike Prop 13 they were designed to specifically help those groups while making sure the state was still able to collect tax revenue from those not in that group.
Agreed. Pick a different number, then. Unemployment, inflation, GDP growth per capita? On all of these the US is doing better than all other major economies.
Honestly, I think you're being willfully ignorant here and missing the point. Those "good numbers" are divorced from reality and this is the least affordable time for working people in American history. Our money is worth less than it used to be, and we have far less of it to buy the necessary things for life. Rent, interest rates, food, and gas are at record prices, and there is no plan in site to make things better for working people.
Life is simply far less affordable for working people than it was two or three years ago, and I think we're past the point of being able to blame the affordability and inflation crisis on Covid.
We're not past the point of being able to blame it on the war in Ukraine. Energy and food costs are a huge part of inflation, and those were and still are being impacted by the war.
IIT denial. This is literally simple case of aggregate GDP projection of PRC ~5% > US ~2% that comments in this thread seem to be butt hurt over. PRC with deflation, export pressures, debt, deflation, youth unemployment IS STILL doing significantly better than US because they aren't the existential problems PRC collapcists make them out to be.
PRC isn't an export dependant country at 20% export:GDP (dependant would be 40%+, PRC peak was 32%), while export dropping from historic highs (+1T in export value in last 4 years / +30%, more than 10 years prior to that) aka PRC underwent the largest pulse of globalization in recent history and export is dropping from absurd historic highs - and PRC retaining more % of exports relative to most, while not even relying on it.
PRC national debt is ~75% of GDP vs US ~120%, total aggregate debt PRC ~270% vs US ~760%. It's significantly more managable problem than US, who let's not forget just printed 5 trillion to deficit spend way out of recession.
There's good deflation and bad deflation. Arguable PRC is good deflation, because it's mostly cost of goods coming down due to excess supply from largest global manufacturer having excess inventory.
Youth unemployment = 80%, AKA ~9M graduates getting employed. Many STEM/skilled/technical. That's a absurd amount of new jobs and talent to drive economy. Multiple times more than US. Broad unemployment also ~5%, so it's an issue that literally fixes it self, kids wait, either get jobs they want or end up working ones they don't.
And PRC doing this while _DELIBERATELY_ slapping local govs, and three redlines on real-estate and broadly deleverage. Useful idiots misread PRC responsibly rebalancing economy as PRC economic collapse, and then pikachu face when PRC still grows at 2x US, because all of these are largely managable problems that PRC has economic headroom to manage and still grow at respectable pace.
20%+ unemployment for young workers and GDP growth is shrinking. Falling exports. Local municipalities on the verge of bankruptcy with over $9 trillion in debt? With deflation making that debt much worse. How is that better than the US?
Really. live in rural china and compare that life to rural US, you will not be singing that tune.
China now has a lot of economic issues, also economists are now saying it will no longer overtake the US as the largest economy with in 10 years as originally forecast.
Based on what metric? Deflation is worse than inflation. Shrinking trade exports are deadly for an export based economy that doesn’t have a robust consumer base or service sector. China is now decoupling its service sector of law firms, accounting firms and consultants. Extrapolate those trends and you would expect China to be increasingly decoupling from the global trade network after decades of open integration and the growth/wealth that comes with it.
whats the alternative? Trump? I'll take the sleepy senior over the unstable senior any day. Besides its not like the president sets the economic plans these days. Their only influence is on government spending. Fed controls the interest rate which affects a broader segment of the economy.
Can you name what was so volatile under Trump? We had no new wars under Trump. No new military engagements. We were planning withdrawals. The economy was doing fine. People say things were volatile under Trump, but I have found that this is only true if you're addicted to the 24/7 news cycle. For most American's day to day, life under Trump was just as boring as life under Biden / Obama / Bush / etc.
I mean.. when Trump was in office, things were good. My local grocery store couldn't even find enough workers they were hiring disabled people (which is great... everyone deserves the ability to make a living). Now everything is expensive and people seem unhappy; not to mention new military engagements in Europe of all places.
Trying to overturn the results of the election via fake electors, "find the votes" in Georgia, pressuring the Arizona governor, pressuring Pence to accept the fake electors...
As opposed to when The Resistance in 2016 tried to overthrow the election results via faithless electors. Stacey Abrams is an "election denier" to this day. As are many Democrats when you ask them about the results of the Bush v. Gore election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016...
On December 14, the Unite For America campaign released a video[36] published on YouTube and other media addressed directly to Republican electors urging that each of them individually, plus 36 of their colleagues (at least 37 Republican electors in total), vote for a Republican other than Donald Trump for President. The video featured numerous public figures,[37] including Debra Messing, Martin Sheen, and Bob Odenkirk, urging Republican electors to prevent a Trump presidency, expressing several times the message: "I'm not asking you to vote for Hillary Clinton". In electing an alternative Republican, the featured speakers ask the elector to become an "American hero" by using the elector's constitutional "authority" to give "service and patriotism to the American people" through a vote of "conscience."[36]
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-moore-appeals-gop-el...
Sure, at the end, but I heard the same claims of volatility during the entirety of his term. It's not like the claim of volatility suddenly appeared after the Jan 6 stuff.
1. Cut interest rates
2. Stop printing billions to defense contractors for Ukraine
3. invest in small business and entrepreneurial training
4. Stop ESG-based investing
1. Would be nice but that can potentially cause inflation to rapidly grow again. It should go down but it would need to be gradual once inflation has fully stabilized. And it’s not just the US that’s suffering heavily under high inflation.
2. Dropping support for Ukraine would signal to China that we wouldn’t have the stamina to support Taiwan if they were attacked. It was only a few years ago that a massive chip shortage hamstrung our economy and nobody wants to repeat that. Dropping support won’t have much significant fiscal impact, either. Most of the billions spent thus far is really the US clearing out older inventories.
3. We already do with tax incentives and other mechanisms. What exactly are you asking for unchecked COVID loans that were forgiven en mass?
4. Do you have figured that indicate ESG-based investing is a net negative and costly to the US? That redirection of such funds would have a notable economic impact?
> 2. Dropping support for Ukraine would signal to China that we wouldn’t have the stamina to support Taiwan if they were attacked. It was only a few years ago that a massive chip shortage hamstrung our economy and nobody wants to repeat that. Dropping support won’t have much significant fiscal impact, either. Most of the billions spent thus far is really the US clearing out older inventories.
It's even worse than this IMO. What this acquiescence would signal to "lesser" nuclear powers is that Pax Americana is truly over. That is a problem. I believe the most likely outbreak of nuclear war is between Pakistan/China/India instead of the classic USA/Russia/China. If you want peace, keep Pax Americana. It's the least evil of all evils.
So you would nominate a new Fed Chair who will raise inflation?
> 2. Stop printing billions to defense contractors for Ukraine
Imperialist Russia preys on weakness, you and David Sacks are the weakest links. What precedent does that set for all other nuclear powers which have imperial ambitions?
I am sure Turkey's control of the strait is very annoying to Moscow. How is that going to work out in the long run?
> 3. invest in small business and entrepreneurial training
So more of this?
>> The government, through the Small Business Administration, gave out nearly $790 billion in PPP loans between March 2020 and May 2021, when the program ended, public records show. Of that amount, $757 billion has been forgiven. [0]
How much of this crony-socialism led to inflation?
>> PPP loans cost nearly double what Biden's student debt forgiveness would have. Here's how the programs compare. [0],[1]
> 4. Stop ESG-based investing
Why? Show your work with a 20 year investment horizon.
the President follows the deeply inclusive and infallible directions of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), whose grace touches every poor Americans' checkbook via UBI, fedTokens and a Smart Phone with iris bioinformation keychain.
“Late stage capitalism” is a term that more and more people are going to become familiar with in the coming years as profit-driven corporations continue to plunder basic necessities like housing and healthcare and put them behind paywalls that fewer and fewer can afford.
The US government has done a good job historically of keeping food prices low enough to prevent mass starvation since that’s a major leading indicator of civil unrest, but the rent is too damn high and it’s only gonna get uglier.
High rent is caused by limitations on market activity. It is caused by zoning and regulations that prevent building housing, or make building housing more expensive.
You are blaming capitalism for a problem that is entirely created by poor government regulation.
But hey, if you prefer, check out what life is in like in late stage socialism. There they built walls to keep people in instead of to keep people out.
Right or wrong, many people will see it this way…under Trump the economy was good for average Americans and under Biden it’s the worst it has been in decades. Joe and Jane Sixpack don’t care about GDP or the government’s official unemployment or inflation numbers. They see the price at the gas pumps and in the grocery store and their dwindling bank account balances.
Rent, food, and fuel inflation has been brutal for most Americans.
People keep arguing about the left without thinking that this degree of income inequality is unsustainable. Liberals should be ashamed of what they have become. There’s no liberty when there’s a de facto Royal class, which are the extremely wealthy.
How is this a left/liberal problem? If anything, it seems like people on the left are more likely to talk about this problem, and - rightly or wrongly - advocate wealth distribution to fix it. Let's keep the conversation here curious, and leave the low-effort partisanship elsewhere.
I dont believe there is a partisan solution to the continuing trend. The curiosity I have is which of the non-political solutions America will pick.
How long till the unstoppable wealth elevator strands enough people at the bottom who are both armed and capable of building effective resistance? Course such things wont effect this group on this site, so best to stay curious, sip coffee and watch.
How is it not a left problem? Despite many issues in right leaning areas, red states basically rank way better on housing affordability. The article cites high housing costs as a causative factor in homelessness.
> red states basically rank way better on housing affordability
Do they? They tend to have cheaper housing in absolute dollar terms, but that has to be weighed against the job market - not for white-collar can-work-remote folks like us, but for folks at the lower end of the income scale in fields such as construction or retail. The OP cites results from Denver and New Orleans as well as New York and Boston. When it comes to homelessness, no state seems to be immune. I know people on the left tend to blame greedy landlords and developers, while people on the right tend to blame over-regulation and limited supply, but just blaming Biden (which satao did at the time I replied) without any supporting reason or facts seems like the kind of partisan pot-shot we shouldn't welcome here.
Usually when left and liberal are used in the same sentence, liberal means center left (clinton/obama) and left refers to progressives (sanders/AOC). I could be wrong but I believe this person is faulting the center left for not being left enough.
Wealth translates directly into political influence - just look at Alabama!
Also - consider that a good amount of wealth is locked up in real estate. Whoever falls in that bucket has political influence and no interest at all that more housing will be built, because that will diminish their wealth.
> Wealth translates directly into political influence - just look at Alabama!
Is this bad on net? From what I've heard, the main political difference between the rich and the rest of the population is that they tend to be more pro-business. That sounds like a good counterweight to the popular antipathy toward business.
> Also - consider that a good amount of wealth is locked up in real estate. Whoever falls in that bucket has political influence and no interest at all that more housing will be built, because that will diminish their wealth.
NIMBYism is overwhelmingly driven by non-rich people, and most people who are rich have most of their wealth in stocks, which gives them an incentive to favor the construction of housing as a complementary good. Again, I'm not seeing the harm here.
Personally I think absurd wealth inequality indicates at least two issues:
1) A lack of re-investment of positive economic activity into the “common good” (infrastructure, education, social services, etc) that were almost certainly instrumental in creating the environment for that wealth to grow in the first place.
2) An undemocratic concentration of political power in a small number of individuals
> 1) A lack of re-investment of positive economic activity into the “common good” (infrastructure, education, social services, etc) that were almost certainly instrumental in creating the environment for that wealth to grow in the first place.
The amount of money spent on those things, adjusted for inflation, has been going up over time in the US. Are we actually under-investing in those things? And how does wealth inequality indicate under-investment?
I think we are definitely under investing in infrastructure.
Amazon builds an empire on cheap-to-use interstate highways and we can’t take a train across the country in less than 3 days.
Bridges falling down, power grids starting wildfires, levees failing, towns with abysmal drinking water quality.
We spend more on healthcare with worse results than other countries, with private profits being skimmed at every step.
We have normalized needing a college degree on your resume for “entry level” jobs and graduating with tens of thousands in debt to achieve this checkmark.
I think it’s an indication because if you were paying back society as you prospered, these black-hole pockets of increasing wealth wouldn’t be so large or common.
Economic prosperity is great. But that was generated in the framework of our society and should be re-invested in it.
You're pointing at something real and important, but I think you've misdiagnosed the problem. We are spending more -- but we're getting a lot less bang for the buck, because costs in those sectors are spiraling out of control [1]. There's some structural reason why things like education are increasing in cost way faster than inflation, and that is what we really need to fix. Spending more money on those things is like bailing water out of the Titanic; it just makes the ship sink a little slower.
I'll take your "very rich" and primarily include billionaires and the extremely affluent in my following statement:
Billionaires shouldn't exist. They shouldn't. We should re-implement proper progressive tax rates (like the US had in the 50s), and ensure that that type of wealth can never happen again.
Billionaires should exist. They should. Just as reasonable.
People have this idea that if we could just harvest all of that money and spread it out, the problem would be solved. Fleece the billionaires. So let's run the numbers.
Currently, there are seven hundred fifty-six billionaires in the United States. I'll do 750 for ease of calculation. Let's say they have three billion each (this is wildly overshooting it, there's some power law and they probably average 1.5 billion, since for every Bezos there are likely fifty people at 1.1 billion). What we get is 2.250 trillion dollars.
We could throw that out to each person (say three hundred million people) for a one-time boon of $7,500. That's it, it's gone. Whoosh. A little more than our COVID payments. Nice to have. Or, you could do about two years of our United States budget deficit. Or you could even knock a little over seven percent off of the $30.93 trillion US debt.
My question is: now that you've harvested the billionaires, what do you do next year? What's the follow-up? Be sure to include the knock-on effects of a lot of slightly less wealthy people hustling their money out of the country.
Billionaires are a glittering distraction to the crabs in the bucket. Hauling them down to your level is satisfying in a monkey way. It isn't much of a solution, though.
The Soviets thought the same thing, but on a different scale. They thought that peasants who owned two cows shouldn't exist, so they sent every peasant who owned two cows to the Gulag in order to re-educate them about equity. Taxation is theft, my friend.
When the government shut down the country for a few years and started sending out "covid pandemic checks", economists warned that the economy would crash. I'm not sure about the true cause and effect here, but the economy sure has crashed.
I think perhaps the effects of a pandemic which killed upwards of 1m Americans may have had a base level of economic impact regardless of the mitigation measures.
Perhaps people forget that things like air travel, restaurants, and going into the office were shutting down naturally in the US even before government recommendations to do so.
And there were actually very few US-wide mandates or anything resembling a government forced “shutting down the country” outside of restrictions on international air travel.
Are you really talking about the couple thousand dollars that people received during the pandemic? In most of the country that might have paid your rent for a month or a few weeks of groceries or if you're fortunate maybe one luxury good.
It's more like when you flatten production, but steady consumption, by having people get paid for work without producing anything, you produce a mismatch between the dollars and the goods they are chasing that results in Inflation.
If you drop money out of helicopters and people spend that money instead of working you get inflation
However, my brother, who is just starting his career works in IT and has a $50,000~ a year salary. He lives in a Tier 3 city in Florida and the median rent for a studio there is $1,500, up from $600 five or so years ago. After taxes, car insurance, car payment, food, and a night out here and there, he barely can save anything after his student loan payments.
This is ridiculous. I can't imagine what others are facing when it comes to the cost of living crisis that is ongoing here. (And for other folks across the pond in England, it's even worse from what I hear.)
Throughout my travels of America, anecdotally, I am seeing more families making long term accommodations out of motels and we seem unwilling from our governments to even address this. I think it's going to get much worse until it gets better unfortunately...