Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

Feel free to look at dividend yields, but I can pretty much guarantee that it has not halfed in the period the stock market doubled. Most likely it stayed relatively flat, somewhere between 1.5% and 2%.

So if you had 100 million you would get 1.7 million as dividend 5-7 years ago, now it's roughly doubled, without selling any of your stocks.

Not that it really matters. Given how much faster the stock market grows compared to salaries you can sell a few percentages of your wealth every year, and still get richerer by doing nothing besides owning.

If you want a flow, here you go: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A053RC1Q027SBEA

Corporate profits in the U.S. have almost doubled since 2019.

> Moreover stock prices incorporate a variety of factors that are irrelevant to wealth distribution.

This handwaves away the most important fact w.r.t. stocks and wealth distribution, which is that wealthy people own stocks and poor people don't. A whopping 38% of Americans don't own any stock.

At the risk of being pedantic, is a "piggy bank" really the right metaphor for this? A piggy bank has actual money within it, regardless of what I think of the piggy bank, it still has money within it. While a stock's total market cap technically only represents the last transaction price multiplied by the number of outstanding shares (kinda). Anyway, just making the point that it isn't like a "bank" in that there is not money in a container of any sort (obviously, banks lend out their own deposits so even my correction is also wrong).

I'm don't have anything better to replace it with, but I am just questioning the "piggy bank" as a metaphor here.

People who have less flow and no stock can increase their savings less than those with stock and the same flow. Many are not able to save at all. Those without stock receive only flow. Those with stock receive both flow and stock, and those with more stock profit more from rising stock.

So the relationship between stock and “flow” is absolutely relevant if we want to understand wealth inequality, because the working class primarily receives money through wages (most of it going out to pay for things such as basic necessities), with the ownership class accruing profit that they receive by virtue of ownership.

Good point. Doubling in 7 years means around 10% growth per year. So, if someone took out 10% of their stock nest-egg per year, it wouldn't have grown at all.

Having said that, GP does illustrate Picketty's point in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that r>g, that is return on capital is greater than economic growth, and Picketty did theorise that this would inevitably lead to concentration of wealth (unless war or other calamities reset the scale).

Another way to say that is comparing velocity to distance traveled is not meaningful.

it doesnt really matter if there are bars of gold to backup the value of a company's market cap. the point is that you can sell the shares for money, and to further emphasize this, you're literally taxed on that gain just like income tax (though annoyingly much lower, which further reinforces mistreatment of working class).

This doesn't contadict that rich renters have it better than actual workers - sucking the riches they produce. You are just pointing out some of the reasons why.

China is flat compared to 10 years ago so yeah I think this argument checks out?

The whole stock market on fire is really a US-specific phenomenon.

https://tradingeconomics.com/china/stock-market

> I assume the United Kingdom of Great Britain must be a paradise for the workers, right?

As a proud citizen and indeed worker of ol' Blighty I assure you it's a paradise of unequalled benevolence. Every worker a member of the board.

Layoffs contribute to the average worker taking a paycut. And we are seeing layoffs even in a market that is soaring. Why do you think that workers wouldn't be affected during a downturn?

Every company that goes down 30% cuts a ton of workers, that's way worse than just a pay cut.

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Yeah, I wouldn't consider any HDHP (High-Deductable Healthcare Plan) to be "good insurance".

It takes about 6 months for me to get an appointment with my GP, and then it takes up to a month for their referral to a specialist to be approved, and only then can I make an appointment with my specialist, which is usually booking a few months out, making it about 9 months before I can see someone.

Or I can go into urgent care, and get a referral submited that day, and see someone in only 3 months.

My father in law has a tumor, and was able to start radiation therapy almost 18 months after he first went into a doctor for his symptoms. The specialist scolded him for how long it took saying "there's permanent damage if you don't start treatment within 6 months, you should have come in much sooner" He nearly punched the guy.

...in what world does it make sense to charge the cost of a motorcycle for a few minutes of a doctor/NP's time and $15 worth of drugs? Jumping through bureaucratic hoops to avoid this is a waste of everybody's time.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/organ-transplants-afford/story...

Google "UFC fighter Ben Askren lung transplant".

yes it's nice of our overlords to not let us literally die in certain circumstances, even though organ transplants are sometimes denied by insurance for really fucked up, evil reasons

Did everyone just forget what it was like before Obamacare? Apparently you didn’t know anyone excluded for pre-existing conditions

Obamacare also mandated coverage for basic care like your annual physical and many mental health conditions.

It’s not perfect, but I guess it’s been long enough that people are forgetting how bad the situation was before.

The only credible plays to modify obamacare since it was enacted were trying to make it worse. I'd be very happy to see it replaced with something better, like medicare for all.

The ACA was a huge compromise and didn’t really do anything to tackle why American healthcare costs are so high. I can see it being washed away for a plan that is actually better, and that isn’t going back to the way things were before it.

Where does this come from? People are happy if you want to improve it. However, for literally a decade now the Republicans have tried to repeal it without any sort of replacement.

Obamacare was a gift to insurance and healthcare providers. It mandated buying government subsidized plans that enabled both sides - to continuously increase costs.

Still it's a bit unfair to Obama, the real problem is Congress and the Supreme Court which mandates we allow political bribery.

HOAs come with the house. You can't just cancel them like you can cancel your netflix subscription.

> And not to mention the special assessments that started showing up in 2025. You could make all sort of assumptions, but there is nothing special about the community.

It's pretty sad that both parts of the statements are true. Special Assessments occur when HOAs aren't capitalized correctly to cover the costs of largely maintenance and this issue is very wide-spread that being a part of an HOA that keeps issuing them isn't 'special'.

Although the alternative is basically your HOA fees would go up but whatever the special assessment is (divided by duration between them) which probably makes it harder to sell the house since you have to claim higher HOA fees compared to a correct capitalized one.

Best to look at the data rather than relying on anecdotes.

An unregulated (or just less-regulated) free market is not going to fix health care cost. The problem is we treat it as a market, full of middle-men spooning away profit, and where people get care generally proportional to the amount they spend.

This is a No True Scotsman fallacy. If America, the #1 champion of free market capitalism cannot get it right, then it may be impossible. Communists claimed the same: they say it didn't work because we haven't tried "true communism" yet.

It’s telling that exactly this mentality has created the strongest nation in human history. They hate us cus they ain’t us.

This is not the right framing. The left vs right battle was invented so people wouldn't think about the up vs down battle. It's wealthy people vs everyone else but the wealthy people convinced everyone else that it's red vs blue.

> Progressives, by definition, want 'progress'. Conversely, Conservatives do NOT want progress; if anything, they want regression and thus their desire to roll everything back done in the name of Progress(ives).

I don't know what this logical fallacy is called, but it's a logical fallacy nonetheless.

I'm going to take you at face value, and assume you're talking about the idealized state and not the parties as they stand right now. (Because the Republicans are increasingly reactionary and not at all conservative in their governing.)

Saying that someone called conservative means that they, by definition, do not want progress is silly. First, it's better to say "change" than progress, because a lot of what has been put in place by the "progressive" party is not necessarily better and a direction forward. Second, you can want change in a conservative manner, and you can be of the belief that small changes are better for society than massive changes, Chesterton's Fence, all that.

This kind of thinking is something most people leave behind after freshman year in University.

so if a junior dev checks in 4k lines of crap code in the codebase, is that progress?

And what do you call the more senior engineer that advises we make changes carefully, and that there are subtle, important reasons why systems are working well today. Is that engineer a conservative?

The "we oughtta run society in a way that <bible mumbo jumbo>" stuff that "conservatives" spew is literally textbook "progressivism", just not in a direction that anyone who self identifies as a "progressive" wants.

The progressive movement is not representative of the whole Democratic Party (it’s widely liberals vs conservatives, not progressives)

Republicans also don’t simply roll everything back that democrats do, as you can see with tariffs

Moderates can be found to have ideas from more than simply two camps. In fact there are many different ideas and movements in the US (liberals, conservatives, progressives, libertarians, neolibs, neocons, social democrats, classical liberalism, …)

Progress towards what? Conserving what exactly? What is moderation between the progress goal, and the conservation of the past?

You can get a nice deal if you alternate, yeah - generic "staples" at your local giant or whatever, Asian market for fresher or unique stuff, dry spices from an Indian grocery...

It's only comfort keeping people going to the same store every time. And I guess the hassle of doing two trips a week or something.

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The megacorp can provide cheap food, it just doesn't want to. In practice they adjust the margins in a data-driven way on individual goods.

UK supermarkets actually provide pretty cheap fresh produce, because the market is pretty competitive. I think the most ridiculous I've seen was a 1kg bag of carrots for 20p.

Many countries or locations do not have highly competitive supermarkets.

Oh, and there's both volume and self-discrimination effects at work. In my supermarket shopping in the Asian food section is often cheaper as they sell big bags of rice and spices, to more cost-conscious consumers. See also: Costco.

> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?

I frequent Asian markets everywhere I’ve lived for certain ingredients, but not for my main grocery shopping.

For regular groceries I don’t think there’s any secret. The markets with extra cheap groceries are just carrying different products at different price points.

A lot of manual labor and optimization on the marginal things.

Ex: Raspberries start to get funky. Bad ones get picked out, good ones get regrouped into a new tray package. Ripe avocados with limited shelf life? Go into deep cold refrigerator overnight, back out the next day. Discount deal on volume, on everything ("2 for $X"). Cash only. etc.

It is likely partly due to cost optimization (the shelf are rarely that organized in these stores) and the fact that they don't sell fresh produce.

> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?

Mega corporations need to increase their returns to shareholders year after year. Mom and pops don't have anyone else to please but themselves - they're often ok with retaining same returns as last year

> How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation?

Megacorps have overheads for managing insane supply lines and lots more stringent enforcement with their product, and generally have much more oversight for things like labor.

The tiny grocery store uses the kid as free labor after school to keep costs down (I was one of those kids), and generally cares less about the quality of the product at the individual level.

The thing I don't get is farmers markets being more expensive.

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Where I live, if I don’t shop at fancy grocery stores 30-40min away, it’s generous to call the produce ‘produce’. Literally never knew onions could look this bad. A lot of the citrus is like deflated in the inside, the bananas are trash, and a single bell pepper is $3. I could go on and on. Just think we enshittified the food situation and now it’s more expensive and way worse quality.

Something unique to the city I'm in is there are some stores that only sell produce. I have no idea how they make it work economically other than locations with cheap rent and being an outlet for distributors but they manage to to have better quality and prices than grocery stores.

Smart. The one in my area also has a restaurant and they also sell baked goods. I think they're definitely doing well for themselves.

Exactly! The big supermarkets have tomatoes that look perfect, but taste like wax. The Asian groceries have lumpy odd-colored tomatoes that actually taste good.

Asian always min maxxing their whole life, the moment you hit adulthood it hit you hard that you always been capped for life

Same here, our freezer has lots of home made dumplings in dinner size packages.

Pancakes also work well for us, we usually put fresh chopped greens into them. We still eat the Bok Choy pancakes prepared months ago, usually when we just want a quick side for leftovers.

Pretty close to personal agency. Let me ask the 'rents.

The $15k is being transferred from entity A to entity B. Both entities are not spending the $15k so there wouldn't be any effect on inflation. If you printed an extra $15k then that would cause inflation because both entity A and entity B would be spending $15k.

Inflation, which means a steady rise in prices overall, happens only when the total money supply in an economy grows. This increase in money, often called "printing money," can be physical cash or digital money created through lending and government policies. Without more money in the system, if prices go up in one area, they have to go down somewhere else because the total money available limits how much can be spent on everything. Sometimes prices rise temporarily due to supply problems, but that is not true inflation unless there is more money chasing goods. This key idea, highlighted by Milton Friedman in his Nobel Prize winning work, shows that lasting inflation is mainly caused by increases in the money supply.

This I think is going to be a great problem that humanity must solve to move forward. Currently, wealth can become overwhelming concentrated and that wealth has mobility across jurisdictions which makes it nearly impossible to implement a wealth tax. The only way I see this ever working is enough powerful nations agree on a uniform wealth tax (say 1%/year) and those nations use their economic strength to pressure other nations to adopt the wealth tax as well. If the USA and EU got on board with a wealth tax I believe they could get the majority of the world to come onboard by implementing high tariffs on any country that does not implement the wealth tax. Of course the problem here is that the US is probably one of the least likely countries to implement a wealth tax, so I think this change will only come with major upheaval or violence.

A wealth tax is just not feasible because almost none of the rich will accept it. See almost any response to your comment as evidence. What we need is strong labor laws and the will for unions in the working class. A wealth tax doesn’t actually change any power dynamics. The rich are still powerful and the poor reliant on them. If the working class can band together, the power dynamics change and we can see some actual progress.

The end result of this logic is that poverty must exist for society to function and I just don’t accept that.

"If you put a 2.5% annual tax on net worth, that net worth would very rapidly find its way to other countries."

Most of that worth is in assets. If they leave the assets they can go.

Inflation, which means a steady rise in prices overall, happens only when the total money supply in an economy grows. This increase in money, often called "printing money," can be physical cash or digital money created through lending and government policies. Without more money in the system, if prices go up in one area, they have to go down somewhere else because the total money available limits how much can be spent on everything. Sometimes prices rise temporarily due to supply problems, but that is not true inflation unless there is more money chasing goods. This key idea, highlighted by Milton Friedman in his Nobel Prize winning work, shows that lasting inflation is mainly caused by increases in the money supply.

Good thing the republicans just enacted the Big Bewildering Bill that did the absolute opposite thing, and ensures even more wealth is redistributed from the bottom to the top!

Yup, isn't that what raising the tax in progressive way would do?

Food and housing would get more more expensive but also food and housing are getting more expensive without this redistribution