jrs100000

This applies to the US and western Europe. There are places in the world where hitmen can be hired by normal people, but they are closer to homeless drug addicts than the sort of professional you are probably envisioning.

Send everyone 12 dollars.

Tiny short term changes either way will not be enough to drastically alter people’s behavior. If those changes are long term and predictable they will absolutely change people’s behavior. 2% may not be much year over year, but over a 30 year mortgage you can expect to take a bath on any house you buy, even with 1% interest rate. And people, rich and poor, do horde cash when they think that returns are going to become negative. In a very mildly deflationary world this happens much more often than in an inflationary one.

Yes, companies can save money because one person with a computer can replace a whole pool of secretaries or a room full of people doing mathematical calculation. You can buy a whole wardrobe of full of clothes for what a few outfits might have cost before, thanks to automation and cheap foreign labor. Weve seen quite a bit of that in the last 50 years. It means you can buy all the mass produced plastic crap you want, but you cant afford a house to put it in. And it has resulted in a MASSIVE boost in wealth equality, its just that it was a global phenomenon and it was the poor people in places like India and China that experienced it.

It doesnt hurt the banks, it destroys them. The modern economy is unable to function without banks. I suppose if you were in favor of entirely destroying the modern economic system, long term deflation would be the easiest way to do it. Dont expect some sort of socialist utopia to come out the other side though. Last time we had a serious deflationary run we ended up with a handful of obscenely wealthy robber barons and a world war.

Thats depreciation, not deflation.

Im not sure what you are trying to say exactly. If you are running your responses through a translator you might try using smaller words so more of the meaning comes through.

Say you owe the bank roughly a million dollars and the house is only worth half a million. If you continue to pay the bank, you are paying double price for your house, plus interest. If you defaulted on the loan you could show up at the bank auction in a fake mustache and get it for half price. There are people out there who would work themselves to death to pay their mortgage because they see it as their sacred duty to the bank. Those people are suckers, and they end up very poor in this scenario.

Now keep in mind that this isnt just house prices were talking about. Stock prices, salaries, food, land, machines, fuel, clothing, vehicles, every month the price of all of it goes down and the value of little slips of paper goes up. This is the ultimate passive income. If you are rich you cash out everything, put your paper in a vault and each month you become richer. There no investment, no economic growth, no liquidity. The economy strangles to death while the people with all the paper control everything thats left.

This is the dream of all the gold, silver, crypto bugs trying to create deflationary currency. They figure they can stockpile enough of the new currency now and come out the other end of the disaster as the new owners of everything.

Everyone seems to be missing the most dangerous part of deflation: If prices fall year over year, collateralize credit becomes incredibly unstable. If you borrow a million dollars from the bank to build a house and then in five years that house is worth half a million…well you would be stupid not to walk away for your loan and leave the bank with a half million dollar hole in its balance sheet. If the whole market does this consistently year after year then banking becomes impossible and the whole system collapses. Weve had this happen before, such as during the Great Depression and very briefly during other market crashes like in 2008. If a central bank has to choose between inflation and deflation, they will choose inflation every time.

Presumably

Also inventing heroin and marketing it as cough medicine.

First off, Reddit (and Lemmy) is not a good place to learn about logical arguments and debate. The whole voting system is designed to filter popular opinions to the top and bury things that people dont like. If you sound authoritative and match your argument to the tone and biases of the community, your statements go to the top. If you get defensive or your answer doesn’t match the subreddit you get dog piled with down votes. If there are any topics you are genuinely an expert in just go hang out in the appropriate subreddit and watch all the complete bullshit, half truths and personal opinions that get recycled over and over as gospel truth.

You dont have to keep going if you are tired and demoralized either. You dont owe pain and suffering and missed opportunities to your past self. You can quit any time you want for any reason or no reason at all, just be prepared to accept the consequences.

Step one is to actually figure out what you want. Too many people spend their whole lives chasing after something they think they are supposed to want, and end up further from happiness every day.

Ok so let me throw out some old timer wisdom. This is what the social media/forums/the Internet are like when the cream is skimmed off and the 90% of users who only browse, and the 8% who only vote are gone. Enjoy it while you can. The summer always ends.