by Lifted from comments at Naked Capitalism MC So your solution includes taking money from those who saved and invested, and re-distribute it to those who spent everything they earned? As someone in the “saved and invested” category, I find that plan to be a non-starter. When I was setting aside 15% of my income for savings and investments, paying extra on my mortgage, and driving older cars, I have friends who (at the same income level as my wife and I) literally spent everything they earned. They had lots of fun, and lots of new stuff that I didn’t. Fast forward 30+ years, and now – in my late 50’s – I’m planning my retirement (before my 60th birthday). My friends? None of them are even thinking of retiring, and one couple has said they will need to work into
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Lifted from comments at Naked Capitalism
MC
So your solution includes taking money from those who saved and invested, and re-distribute it to those who spent everything they earned? As someone in the “saved and invested” category, I find that plan to be a non-starter.
When I was setting aside 15% of my income for savings and investments, paying extra on my mortgage, and driving older cars, I have friends who (at the same income level as my wife and I) literally spent everything they earned. They had lots of fun, and lots of new stuff that I didn’t.
Fast forward 30+ years, and now – in my late 50’s – I’m planning my retirement (before my 60th birthday). My friends? None of them are even thinking of retiring, and one couple has said they will need to work into their 70’s.
We made different choices, and ended up in different places – but that doesn’t obligate me to hand them what I have.Yves
What a bunch of total nonsense.
If you’ve been able to work on a consistent basis at decent enough paying jobs that you could save, it is substantially due to luck: being born into a stable middle to upper middle class family, being white and male, being born at a time when there was enough growth in the economy that you could land good jobs early in your career, which is critical for your lifetime earnings trajectory. Oh, and not having you or a spouse or a child get a costly medical ailment that drained your savings. And not winding up in a job where you were being ethically compromised and stood up against it, resulting in career and earnings damage.
Did you miss that college grads had a worse time that high school grads and even dropouts in landing jobs in 2008-2010? And getting no or crap jobs then set them back permanently? And this includes graduates in the supposedly more “serious” STEM fields, where contrary to DC urban legend, there aren’t a lot of entry level jobs. You do well if you find employment, but save in a few niches like petroleum engineering, the unemployment rate is actually worse for STEM college grads overall than liberal arts grads.
……………..
…inflation is created in the real economy due to any of commodities inflation (cost-push inflation), wage-pull inflation (created by too much demand, or in MMT terms, too much net government spending) and more recently and not sufficiently acknowledged, by monopolies and oligopolies (see pricing of cable services and drugs, which have monopolies via patents) . Interest rates are a different matter and are controlled by the central bank. We’ve had risk-free interest rates below the inflation rate for years now thanks to the ministrations of the Fed.
Central banks have the power to kill the economy (raising interest rates so high that it induces inflation) but not much/any power to stimulate (save goosing asset prices, which only trickles down a bit to the real economy). The cliche is “pushing on a string”.