Ah, I can see the misunderstanding 😅😂
Thank you for being willing to share your story and background a bit. It sounds like we both have a strong interest in using personal finance as a way to develop autonomy in our lives.
You make a great point about the inevitability of issues at some (unknown but important) inflection point in debt to GDP ratio. Britain is a great example, as well, though I would suggest that anybody in the UK has a standard of living today much higher than the top 1% there 100 years ago… especially anyone not White. So maybe it’s not all bad?
As an American who has really been lucky to not have had serious consequences of unemployment and gaps in health insurance, I’d love to see the social safety net vastly expanded… including a universal basic income, though that’s a whole other topic. (One pro of the UBI is that someone with a criminal record has to worry less about getting a job, because their minimal needs are met. Similarly, why would you commit petty crimes like selling crack for $5 if getting caught meant losing your UBI?)
For what it’s worth, my car is a bicycle. 😂 Though my apartment is pretty sweet thanks to geographic arbitrage and being able to work online.
I sincerely appreciate your perspective, and thank you for filling me in on details I hadn’t been considering (like the paper you sent earlier). I think with Trump having just left office, I’m still bitter over Republicans being “deficit scolds" while out of office but immediately ballooning the deficit while in office. The zombie voodoo “debt is a crisis" economics are often just political hypocrisy and a guide to obstruct government in order to regain control in a severely broken democratic system that rewards sparsely populated areas. (It’s nothing new, of course, but it’s still frustrating.)
I’m not saying you’re motivated by that, and I appreciate your deep understanding of a subject that I like to read about once or twice a year.
I would ask you if you like the “shadow stats" site for unemployment and inflation numbers. Or do you think stock market valuations are a good proxy indicator for inflation? Since I’m getting the sense that you don’t like the CPI with substitutions that’s used now. (Tim apparently does, since he says in the article that substitutions practically eliminate inflation, which is a bit a stretch.)
