There's a pretty radical difference between a notion of inevitability qua economic fundamentals and deficit spending, versus "one political party will specifically and deliberately destroy everything".hypnophant posted:I don't think we're going to raise income taxes by 8% across the board, but I also subscribe to the MMT idea that debt isn't a meaningful fiscal constraint so it doesn't matter. However, I do think the influence of tax protestors on fiscal policy is past its peak. We'll find out in another month and a half but I don't see a way for the eight dumbest republican congresspersons to force through massive, and massively unpopular, cuts. They might be able to force a voluntary default, and I expect that will be the end of any meaningful career they have in congress. I'm used to "tax protestors" referring to sovcits, but I assume that's not what you mean here? Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Oct 6, 2023 |
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Oct 6, 2023 23:18
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Subvisual Haze posted:I admire the purity of heart and faith many of you have in the eternal economic growth of America. There's a difference between that and knowing enough economics to know what you're positing is wrong, but thanks for engaging in the fallacy of appealing to motive to make clear how baseless in real knowledge your argument is.
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Oct 6, 2023 23:59
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If only we could go back to the good governance of blaming Joe Manchin for accomplishing nothing. Or the Parliamentarian. Or the existence of the filibuster.
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Oct 7, 2023 00:06
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Discendo Vox posted:I'm used to "tax protestors" referring to sovcits, but I assume that's not what you mean here? ehh broadly I'm talking about Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform, and their ideological allies which includes a pretty broad swath. Sovcits are an offshoot but they don't have any influence of their own.
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Oct 7, 2023 00:15
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hypnophant posted:ehh broadly I'm talking about Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform, and their ideological allies which includes a pretty broad swath. Sovcits are an offshoot but they don't have any influence of their own. Gotcha, starve the beasters.
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Oct 7, 2023 00:27
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pseudanonymous posted:There's a difference between that and knowing enough economics to know what you're positing is wrong, but thanks for engaging in the fallacy of appealing to motive to make clear how baseless in real knowledge your argument is. Post/avatar game on point today
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Oct 7, 2023 01:52
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Subvisual Haze posted:If only we could go back to the good governance of blaming Joe Manchin for accomplishing nothing. Or the Parliamentarian. Or the existence of the filibuster. At this point you seem to be spouting shibboleths that only make sense to an audience of people who all consume the exact same half-dozen podcasts you have in heavy rotation. Probably time to sit this one out.
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Oct 7, 2023 03:54
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Lots of handwaving this problem away itt with hypotheticals like the US suddenly taxing an additional 8% of GDP or doing away with corruption/misappropriation of funds (lol). I really don’t think Subvisual Haze is totally off the map here. And so what if OECD countries tax GDP at an 8% higher rate than the US. Isn’t that funding single payer healthcare systems and other broad social safety nets? Not just, ya know, servicing debt interest? MMT is also a pipe dream, there is no free lunch. The Congressional Budget Office expects interest payments to make up 6.7% of GDP by 2053. By that measure, US debt interest payments will become the single biggest federal expenditure by 2051, when it eclipses Social Security. I don’t know what it means when the US can’t service its debt obligations but I’m not particularly eager to find out either. Are there solutions? Sure. Will they be implemented? That is the hard part and has yet to be seen
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Oct 7, 2023 03:56
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hobbez posted:I don’t know what it means when the US can’t service its debt obligations but I’m not particularly eager to find out either. Are there solutions? Sure. Will they be implemented? That is the hard part and has yet to be seen I fully trust in america to do the right thing, after it’s tried everything else
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Oct 7, 2023 04:48
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also funding the social safety net is two thirds of what the federal government does. That’s very much where most of the money goes.
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Oct 7, 2023 04:50
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hobbez posted:Lots of handwaving this problem away itt with hypotheticals like the US suddenly taxing an additional 8% of GDP or doing away with corruption/misappropriation of funds (lol). I really don’t think Subvisual Haze is totally off the map here. You're solidly on the side of "economists" who use excel (doesn't float enough integers) badly to build economic models. https://www.businessinsider.com/reinhart-and-rogoff-admit-excel-blunder-2013-4 It's weird how the people making these kind of claims about deficit borrowing always want to cut social services and are also incompetent. You're in good company. Also lol that your forecast of the future says the major problem facing the US economy in 30 years is going to be excessive borrowing.
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Oct 7, 2023 05:53
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Hadlock posted:I guess where I'm going with this is, China was going to design their own chip eventually. There's a bunch of both low power Arduino style (which are backwards compatible with the .... M3? ARM instruction set going back to the 1980s) and med-low desktop style RISC-V CPUs coming out of China now. It's kind of funny because Berkeley designed and released the RISC-V instruction set for free and will (more than 50%, guess) become the bedrock of Chinese cpu design Updates https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-china-tech-war-risc-v-chip-technology-emerges-new-battleground-2023-10-06/ quote:US-China tech war: RISC-V chip technology emerges as new battleground Some guy in the comments keeps pointing out that Marco Rubio took a bunch of campaign money ($250k usd?) from softbank which is in cahoots with ARM and their IPO
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Oct 7, 2023 07:07
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My job would be a lot easier if we loosened up immigration policy. USCIS can suck it. Seriously, what percentage of inflation is driven by the labor market dislocation?
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Oct 7, 2023 11:58
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Borscht posted:My job would be a lot easier if we loosened up immigration policy. USCIS can suck it. Can you define that term for us in the cheap seats? When I search for that term, mostly I get are things from Brookings so I'm looking askance at that for the moment. I found a definition of a Dislocated Worker from the state of Connecticut but I don't understand how it relates to immigration.
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Oct 7, 2023 12:07
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pseudanonymous posted:You're solidly on the side of "economists" who use excel (doesn't float enough integers) badly to build economic models. When did I say I want to cut social services? When did I say it’s “the major problem.” You’re free to make a counter argument any time, all I see is a list of complete non sequiters
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Oct 7, 2023 12:25
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Magnetic North posted:Can you define that term for us in the cheap seats? When I search for that term, mostly I get are things from Brookings so I'm looking askance at that for the moment. I found a definition of a Dislocated Worker from the state of Connecticut but I don't understand how it relates to immigration. I was attempting to refer to the fact that in the global labor market, labor supply and labor demand are not fulfilling each other because of dumb racism. I was using it a little loosely and maybe a little inaccurately too. Market dislocations happen when price, supply, and demand get out of whack. We're undersupplied on labor and there's literally tens of millions of people who would love to come to the US, participate in our economy and build a prosperous life. That should lower inflation as well since there would be a productivity boost associated with all that new labor.
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Oct 7, 2023 12:56
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Bringing this over from the home buying thread:QuarkJets posted:e: Put another way, you said "Cost of shelter may go up vs inflation, but you can’t ignore income gains." But real income has not been growing, it's been stagnant for decades. If the cost of shelter is going up vs inflation (it is), and real income is not going up vs inflation (true), then the cost of shelter is going up vs real income (also true) This is easily proven false. Real personal income in the USA has went steadily up over decades: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI Basically a 7x over 50 years. Granted it was not equally distributed across the population but that’s a different topic.
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Oct 7, 2023 16:24
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pmchem posted:Granted it was not equally distributed across the population but that’s a different topic. Come on man.
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Oct 7, 2023 16:27
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pmchem posted:Granted it was not equally distributed across the population but that’s a different topic. The heaviest lift "granted" has ever done here
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Oct 7, 2023 16:28
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Skyl3lazer posted:The heaviest lift "granted" has ever done here Gimme a break, you guys want median real household or personal income instead? Those are also up 30% since the 80s, just a younger time series: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N Real income has went up any way you wanna slice it
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Oct 7, 2023 16:32
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pmchem posted:Gimme a break, you guys want median real household or personal income instead? Those are also up 30% since the 80s, just a younger time series: Generously that shows a 10% increase (~68k to ~76k). The cost of housing since 2010 has gone up.....more than 10%
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Oct 7, 2023 16:45
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Skyl3lazer posted:Generously that shows a 10% increase (~68k to ~76k). The cost of housing since 2010 has gone up.....more than 10% You’re making the same mistake that Quark did in comparing real and nominal metrics. Also, clearly, my ~30% number was from the start of that series. Dunno why you picked 2010 but ok.
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Oct 7, 2023 16:48
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pmchem posted:You’re making the same mistake that Quark did in comparing real and nominal metrics. Also, clearly, my ~30% number was from the start of that series. Dunno why you picked 2010 but ok. I picked 2010 because it's a solid post-recession falloff. If you look from the start of the series in 1980 and use the 300% increase from your first chart, the indexed home price has gone up over 1,000%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USSTHPI There just isn't a world where housing has stayed 'as affordable', let alone 'more affordable' compared to any point in the past (except for the covid-era spikes). e; The fed even agrees with this via their own 'housing affordability index' so I'm not sure what you're arguing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FIXHAI
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Oct 7, 2023 16:54
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"Real income is not going up versus inflation" is not a sensible statement, but quark was correct in the thrust of his argument (at least the part pmchem quoted) that housing affordability is going down for most americans. Everyone knows and agrees with that, and the fact that quark made an amateur mistake in his post didn't change the conclusion. This thread is for quibbling over the economics, which is why it's appropriate to point out that it's meaningless to compare real income to inflation, since real income is, by definition, nominal income with inflation removed.Skyl3lazer posted:e; The fed even agrees with this via their own 'housing affordability index' so I'm not sure what you're arguing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FIXHAI The fed doesn't have any tools to do anything about house prices separate from prices in the aggregate. If congress wants to make housing more affordable, it needs to take specific fiscal action to do something about either the supply or demand for housing.
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Oct 7, 2023 17:07
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Skyl3lazer posted:I picked 2010 because it's a solid post-recession falloff. You can’t possibly be using an index started in 2022 to argue about multi decade trends lol. House prices have went up a lot but do you have any idea what mortgage rates were at the start of your comp, 1980? Super high. Look at mortgage payments relative to disposable income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDSP Significantly down since 1980. Or look at nominal median personal income vs shelter since your 1980 date: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=19QKI Shelter has gotten more affordable for the median American since 1980.
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Oct 7, 2023 17:07
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pmchem posted:You can’t possibly be using an index started in 2022 to argue about multi decade trends lol.  1980 is almost exactly when the trend in housing diverges from the trend in all prices, so I think your second graph is misleading. VVV: quote:The expenditure weight in the CPI market basket for OER is based on the following question that the Consumer Expenditure Survey asks of consumers who own their primary residence: Oof. Owner's equivalent rent has 3.5x the weighting of rent of primary residence. hypnophant fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 17:15
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cpi shelter is an absolute fuckin joke which will reveal itself instantly if you ever look up how they figure it out housing affordability went to absolute poo poo but use a different measure like income actually spent on housing
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Oct 7, 2023 17:16
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Yes, shelter is part of CPI and has went up more than the composite index but if you’re taking about whether it’s easier to afford shelter, you can’t just ignore income changes. Look again at the plot of median personal income divided by cpi shelter. Median income has increased faster than shelter costs, since 1980 (or most other starting points). As an aside, this is one reason why people hated the stagflation of the 70s so much: housing was getting much less affordable for a period there. e: bob I also linked mortgage payments relative to disposable income, if you don’t like cpi shelter. The housing market sucks right now but I’m amazed that people refuse to concede to plain data that affordability got better over 40 years. Gotta take some emotion out of the analysis. pmchem fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 17:20
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Could your average pizza delivery driver and waitress couple buy a house today? Because that's what my parents did in 1988 when I was born. A full blown 2BR/1B starter home. After my sister was born, they upgraded to a 3BR/2B four years later, my dad having gone from pizza delivery to parcel delivery driver. Is that possible today, given the expected average wages of these two occupations?
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Oct 7, 2023 17:21
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bwip.... bwip.... https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/
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Oct 7, 2023 17:22
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bob dobbs is dead posted:bwip.... bwip.... Bob you know better than to ignore interest rate effects “House prices have went up a lot but do you have any idea what mortgage rates were at the start of your comp, 1980? Super high. Look at mortgage payments relative to disposable income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDSP Significantly down since 1980.”
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Oct 7, 2023 17:24
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I feel like there has been a ton of growth in the top end of income, and in certain localities a fair amount on the bottom. But man, it seems like the bog standard analyst (or whatever the equivalent is in your profession) has been around 70-100K for the past 20 years. I don't know how to pull the data for that though.
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Oct 7, 2023 17:24
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Like, RIGHT NOW is a hard time to buy. But progress really was made since 1980 until basically 2022/2023.
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Oct 7, 2023 17:27
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pmchem posted:Shelter has gotten more affordable for the median American since 1980. Good lord is that actually your argument? In 1980, the median house price was $64,000. Lets say 20% down, or $51,200. And wow, 1980 has mortgage rates of about 16%, very high! Your monthly price on a 30y fixed would be $689, which is a lot for your $21,000 median income (or $1750/mo). That's $689 / $1750, or almost 40% of your monthly income (ignoring taxes for the moment)! So let's see how hard that was compared to today. Today, the median house price is $416,000, so a $332,000 mortgage assuming we can still make the 20% down, at today's rate of 8.6%. That's $2,583 a month, more obviously, but our wage has risen to $74,500 on average! That's $6200/mo (again, ignoring taxes). That's $2583 / $6200, or wait, 41.6% of your monthly income. That number is higher than the other number already, and that's before looking at anything else, like the fact that more households are now two-income vs one, or the fact that education and food inflation has far outstripped the dumb rear end "CPI" metric, or the fact that the downpayment is larger relative to those median incomes. Those are the best possible numbers for your outlook, and they already say that at best housing has only become slightly less affordable. There's just no way to manipulate those numbers to say that it's easier to buy a house today than in 1980. bob dobbs is dead posted:bwip.... bwip.... Or just look at these instead of using the random medians lol Skyl3lazer fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 17:31
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pmchem posted:You can’t possibly be using an index started in 2022 to argue about multi decade trends lol. This is only true if you ignore the rest of what people have to spend money on. Food, energy, transportation, fuel, education, healthcare, taxes, childcare. Your analysis is totally ignoring how affordable these other things are.
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Oct 7, 2023 17:46
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pmchem posted:Yes, shelter is part of CPI and has went up more than the composite index but if you’re taking about whether it’s easier to afford shelter, you can’t just ignore income changes. Look again at the plot of median personal income divided by cpi shelter. Median income has increased faster than shelter costs, since 1980 (or most other starting points). If I show you this graph and claim housing has gotten more affordable since 1990, I hope you can see why it's misleading:  I think this is one of those cases where zooming in very tight on the measure of center, and ignoring the spread, is going to give the wrong impression. It's uncontroversial that there has been increasing variance in incomes in the US since the 80s, and it's harder to say what housing price variance has done but i'd wager it has gone down as new builds have concentrated in the luxury segment and cheap land close to employment centers has dried up. You can see how this squeezes people who are below the median: there are more people who make, say, 80% or less of the median income, and fewer houses selling for less than 80% of the median price. Meanwhile, people who were at or above the median income might be paying the same or a bit less, but those people were not overly worried about housing affordability before and they still aren't now. So I still think your insistence we have to take median income into account is wrong; housing affordability might be the same or even a little bit better for everyone but it can still be much worse for the people who worry about housing affordability, which is mostly not the people at or above the median income. hypnophant fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 17:54
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I mean the “disposable” income comparison series takes care of that but also the chart was posted earlier showing that shelter outpaced cpi as a whole, so my second plot has no problem with that either. i’m happy at least that people have stopped arguing that real personal income didn’t go up over time e: was replying 2 posts up. people keep moving goalposts about which affordability matters. i think median is a good point of discussion because it’s too hard to find data elsewhere and it’s the metric relevant to the average joe pmchem fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 17:55
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no, your ansatz is always power law for economic quantities and you dont have a meaningful variance most of the time
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Oct 7, 2023 |
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Oct 7, 2023 17:56
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pmchem posted:I mean the “disposable” income comparison series takes care of that but also the chart was posted earlier showing that shelter outpaced cpi as a whole, so my second plot has no problem with that either. It only went up if you measure it relative to an inflation metric that ignores the largest expenses people have (shelter, food, transportation, education)
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Oct 7, 2023 17:57
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You can't have the explicit policy goal of decades of telling millions of your citizens that they should treat their home as the single most important asset and wealth building vehicle, while also having "affordable" housing. Housing becoming significantly more affordable for people, especially people on the lower end of the income spectrum, would require a lot more supply being built, driving down prices of existing housing assets. Boomers who have spent decades building their home equity would take significant haircuts. The political powers won't do this, because after billionaires the only other people elected officials give a poo poo about is wealthy Boomers. The actual large scale reforms that would need to happen to see a relative decrease in what people pay for shelter will never happen, because the people who own that shelter now don't want to see it happen. Instead we'll muddle along for another 20 years as the Boomers die off and there's a massive wealth transfer to Millennials, followed by the winners (people with wealthy and house-wealthy parents) predictably pulling the ladder up behind them. In 2033 I predict that a lot of currently 37 year old Bernie voters will suddenly discover the religion of NIMBY and be deeply concerned about property values and how density upzoning is "not right for this neighborhood".
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Oct 7, 2023 18:00
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