Higher rents were mostly offset by declining costs of goods such as motor vehicles and furniture.
Um, they’re still in the stratosphere. The price gouging never stopped. Yes, we want them to come back down to normalcy.
You don’t want deflation, no. I know we all want to pay less for the things we buy, especially necessities, but if your grocery prices, in general, came down in price, there’s a good chance that’s a reflection of worse economic conditions.
In general, it has. That doesn’t mean your boss gave you a raise, personally. That doesn’t happen a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. But we’ve measured that as people have changed jobs, average wages have increased.
Prices go up, wages stay down; that’s how it’s supposed to work. Prices going down? My God, imagine things being more affordable!??!! It would break everything if people could afford their necessities. If people didn’t struggle for survival, they could start thinking about how things are being done, and how they could be done differently. So the answer is obvious: everything has to be made worse, continuously and iteratively worse over time. That’s the plan and it’s the best we can do, we are told. Isn’t strange how all of these market rules always favor the rich? Why do we have to do this over and over and over? Just for the rich.
If prices generally went down across the board, it would be indicative of producers being unable to sell their products, which means they produce less, which means they lay people off, which means we’re all out of work, which means we have no jobs or money, which means that a rich person’s incentive is to keep their money in a giant pile and not actually circulate it in the economy. With a little bit of inflation, the prices of things are stable enough for the average person to use currency without resorting to a barter system, and the rich person needs to invest their money in order to avoid the guarantee that they lose the value of that money to inflation. The report that we’re reading and commenting on shows a small real wage growth, meaning wages growing faster than inflation.
