Comment by throw0101c
1 year ago
> Inflation is an extreme handout to the wealthy.
Debatable.
But the opposite, deflation, hits the poor much harder.
It was deflation, the gold standard, and the insistence of balanced budgets that caused revolutions all over the world:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...
It was dropping prices that caused ferment in the US:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
It was FDR getting off the gold standard and balance budgets that helped the US recover:
* https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-money-makers-how-roosevelt-...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24945314-the-money-maker...
> Money is by definition zero sum, otherwise the word "inflation" would have no meaning.
I have no idea what this even means.
I wonder who you saw debating that. It looks really settled down and unanimous to me. Inflation is extremely harmful to poor people.
The only debate I see is about whether the Austrian school has a point and merely printing money is already harmful or if harm comes only when prices increase.
Also,
> But the opposite, deflation, hits the poor much harder.
Yes. Two different things can be true.
> I wonder who you saw debating that. It looks really settled down and unanimous to me. Inflation is extremely harmful to poor people.
The debate is about the alternatives / counter-factuals: would <0% inflation (read: deflation) be better or worse for poor people than >>0% inflation? How do those two compare to ~0% (e.g., 2%, the Fed target) inflation?
There's a reason why I linked to articles on the topic of the 'cross of gold' and austerity. We've had other ways of doing things in the past and are on the current system for a reason.
A lot of folks seem to want to get rid of the Fed, get back to gold, mercantilism (which is basically what Trump's tariffs are attempting), and generally go back to the 1800s way of doing money/finance:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
Try reading Project 2025's chapter on the Federal Reserve:
> Free Banking. In free banking, neither interest rates nor the supply of money is controlled by the government. The Federal Reserve is effectively abolished, and the Department of the Treasury largely limits itself to handling the government’s money. Regions of the U.S. actually had a similar system, known as the “Suffolk System,” from 1824 until the 1850s, and it minimized both inflation and economic disruption while allowing lending to flourish.[23]
[…]
> As in the Suffolk System, competition keeps banks from overprinting or lending irresponsibly. This is because any bank that issues more paper than it has assets available would be subject to competitor banks’ presenting its notes for redemption. In the extreme, an overissuing bank could be liable to a bank run.[!] Reckless banks’ competitors have good incentives to police risk closely lest their own holdings of competitor dollars become worthless.[24]
* https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA...*
Yay! Bank runs!
> Inflation is an extreme handout to the wealthy.
> Debatable
Wait how is this debatable. We saw wealth inequality explode in ‘20 ‘21 ‘22 and ‘23 as the wealthiest Americans navigated rapid inflation and then rate cuts by strategically buying everything they could and then turning into activist investors and forcing RTO and mass layoffs despite record profits.
Wealthy people can take advantage of economic turmoil by selling high and buying low, the greatest example being Buffets mass sell off and subsequent repurchasing.
What am I missing?
> Wait how is this debatable. We saw wealth inequality explode in ‘20 ‘21 ‘22 and ‘23 as the wealthiest Americans navigated rapid inflation
What "rapid inflation"? Inflation was right around the historical average for 2020, 2021, 2023, and 2024. The only outlier was 2022 with 8% inflation, but that's still far from "rapid" historically speaking: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...
> What am I missing?
Wealth inequality was previously at its highest point in the US during the Gilded Age, when the US was still on the gold standard and inflation was not as much of a thing (and deflation often reined):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
During the 1970s, US inflation was quite high:
* https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832
and yet during the same time period the wealth ownership of the top 0.1% went down:
* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i...
US wealth inequality only really started rising in the 1980s—as inflation went down. Further, as The Guardian graph shows, concentration has gone up from the 1990s up until now, even though the last few decades have had the lowest, and most stable, inflation numbers in history:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
So the link between inflation and wealth concentration does not appear to have any correlation according to the historical data.
I would hazard to guess that a more promising link to wealth concentration/inequality would be the cutting of tax rates (both corporate and personal) starting during the Reagan administration, and how it reduced redistribution of money to the lower- and middle-class.
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