The complaints of inflation are insane.

[Joij21]

When the government drops $3500 in my bank account every month from SS, there is no paying it back.

Your SS isn't free. It was payed for by taking out some of your money from your paycheck when you were working. Money which entered circulation from government stimulus payed for by treasury bonds purchased by the Federal Reserve which in turn printed those dollars. The government now owes money plus interest back to the Federal Reserve when the bonds mature. Who pays this? Everyone via taxation.

Money comes in via stimulus, goes out via taxation. Just like the bills that are eventually due via a credit card. It's all debt, that's how fiat works, because without artificial scarcity your money would have no intrinsic value. It's just paper strips and ones and zeros within a circuit.

 

[Farm Boy]

There wasn't a generation of lag when they started SS, which means your kids are paying for it, which is the only way it could ever work.

 

[El_Machinae]

It is always the kids paying for it, because it's very hard to move current production into the future. Senior citizens eat because the current workers are producing, which means that their food is coming from restrictions on current worker consumption. Whether that's in the form of currently taxed dollars or from saved dollars, it's the same effect

 

[Farm Boy]

Right, but the accounting fig leaf doesn't even work.

 

[Kaitzilla]

It is crunch time on the railroads.

10 of 12 unions have reached terms now, but the two big ones with 90000 workers are still mulling a strike at the end of Friday.

White house is doing a full court press to get a deal.

The White House is racing to prevent a railroad worker strike, fearing it could cripple the economy and hurt Democrats in the midterms

A looming railroad worker strike could cripple supply chains and cause a "national economic disaster," the US Chamber of Commerce president warned.

www.businessinsider.com

The strike risk continues to grow.

Amtrak has shut down long distance travel which tends to be more than one state in distance.

The main sticking point is 0 sick days for railroad workers.
If they have a heart attack, they are fired.

 

[Hygro]

There wasn't a generation of lag when they started SS, which means your kids are paying for it, which is the only way it could ever work.

There was literally a one year lag, though, which helped create one of the deepest but short lived austerity driven recessions in USA history (1936).

Though money is the medium, it is resource-wise paid for reducing the consumption of current workers and giving that consumptive power to the not-working. Money wise, paid for by printing money, with the taxes offsetting the inflation/goods shortage. You could argue legally the taxes pay for it, but I believe it was the CBO a few years back whose predictions assume it will get paid regardless of its debt position and future expectations.

 

[Farm Boy]

Right. But either way, "your kids" pay for it. It can't work any other way. Regardless of how it's accounted for. Right?

 

[Sommerswerd]

Some people don't have kids... but they are still eligible to collect Social Security... which... I've never thought about that until now... :

 

[Farm Boy]

Free riders I guess?

 

[El_Machinae]

It didn't be entirely the Young of your country. I guess in the American system, where the dollars are converted into t-bills, it is more so.

Theoretically, you could use the Social Security tax to then fund the development of a retirement home that is not available until that cohort is 65. But that will be a very small portion of the total tax and total future consumption

 

[Birdjaguar]

It can be measured at that level, but does that measurement have any more meaning than at any other level? Surely the unit of economic growth is indavidual production?

The indian tribes have been isolated communities for many millennia, and then came fire/the clovis point/agriculture. Then they had more food, were able to raise more children. That is real growth, and did not require investment from outside.

You choose to show it at county level. You could had chosen individual houses or individual states and made the same point.

Yes measuring economic growth at lower levels can demonstrate its impact (or lack there of) on actual communities. That is what the county map above shows: 50% of the recovery benefit landed in 20 counties.
How do you measure individual production?
It seems to me that the easiest way to measure economic growth at the city, county, regional level is to add up the percentage change in imported dollars entering the area and compare that to the change in population growth for the same period. That gets you towards a $/person change average.

More later....

 

[Hygro]

Right. But either way, "your kids" pay for it. It can't work any other way. Regardless of how it's accounted for. Right?

Well, yeah. The current workers pay for the current retirees. The only calculus + semantics against that would be if the demand boost was so great it created more production and therefore income than it took. That's not far fetched in every scenario, but ... that's far from every scenario. Yes, "your kids" pay for it.

 

[Samson]

How do you measure individual production?

I know how to MEASURE my production, list all the things I have produced. Quantifying it is another question, how do you value scientific papers and open source software, but I would say that is more of a criticism of using dollar values to measure the economy than anything else.

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, yeah. The current workers pay for the current retirees. The only calculus + semantics against that would be if the demand boost was so great it created more production and therefore income than it took. That's not far fetched in every scenario, but ... that's far from every scenario. Yes, "your kids" pay for it.

Nurses at assisted living centers are interesting people. They get callous-y and a type of tough. But every now and then, I can tell a loss has rung a friend of mine's bell.

Man it was fun to listen to him talk about a pilot with Alzheimers. You could tell he adored this man. One could pull him back for a few moments with random questions sometimes. "Hey Bob(not his name)! What was it like flying a B-52?" "Like flying a G**- ****ed dump truck!"

 

[El_Machinae]

Some people don't have kids... but they are still eligible to collect Social Security... which... I've never thought about that until now... :

Some identifiable cohorts also didn't make it to 65 on average.

Also, because it is a regressive tax ( assuming people accept the marginal utility of money ), and because it calculates against only 35 years of work, it effectively penalizes longer work lives compared to shorter work lives plus education. In other words, on your 36th year of work you are taxed, but you see nothing for it.

So if you come from a family that couldn't afford college, and started working at 16 because finishing High School wasn't worth it, and then die at 60 from being a coal miner or black, you pay in 44 years to subsidize the retirement of people whose lifestyles allowed them to live above 65

 

[Joij21]

All transactions are a redistribution of money and money spent one way cannot be a different way. Economic growth is not a rising tide lifts all boats. The map I posted earlier show this. The growth in those 20 counties lifted the entire country. You are raising the point of how can we create wealth and not take from somewhere else? At the transaction level, I'm not sure you can. Improved productivity seems closest. passing out free dollars might, but that has other issues.

Since you seem to acknowledge that growth requires money going negative somewhere else, I'm still not sure why you insist a credit card isn't growth.

Is it less glorious? Because it didn't come from outside the community?

But in all honesty community is a dead and irrelevant concept anyway (the internet and telecommunications making it more antiquated as time goes on). What's inside or outside doesn't matter, they're all part of the same macro-ecosystem. Perhaps a person in debt within one's own personal community is more devastating (in a moral sense) than a stranger from an outside community that one cares not for. Therefore growth only from the perspective of the micro seems to be applicable to you, even if in reality the prosperity of your own community might be a parasitic plague to other communities located across the country (or even foreign communities, American imperialism and all that jazz, that is if you believe such things).

 

[El_Machinae]

So, to be clear, credit card usage economically devastates the local community. "Devastates" might be the wrong work, but it siphons out wealth at rates well-above any type of achievable economic growth rate attainable from its usage.

 

[Farm Boy]

20 counties lift the whole nation?

Debt forgiveness goes in largest single part to D.C.

Heavyass skinny rich people.

 

[Kaitzilla]

The strike risk continues to grow.

Amtrak has shut down long distance travel which tends to be more than one state in distance.

The main sticking point is 0 sick days for railroad workers.
If they have a heart attack, they are fired.

The strike has been averted on the last day!

No more firings for unexpected trips to the hospital.

Averted U.S. Railroad Strike Is Wake-Up Call For Company Executives

The deal to avert a national railroad strike that President Joe Biden announced Thursday does not mean business leaders should assume that the chances of a service stoppage have completely passed.

www.forbes.com

“If they accept the deal that was announced at about 5 a.m. (0900 GMT), workers whose pay had been frozen will win double-digit increases and will be allowed to seek certain types of medical care without fear of being punished, union leaders said. The agreement includes an immediate 14.1% wage rise, the railroads said,” according to Reuters.

 

[Farm Boy]

Now, I'm pretty sure being fired doesn't actually mean in this circumstance what it usually means to other jobs, but still. Yes, one should be able to go to hospital.