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Mainstream economists portray inflation — defined as a currency that loses a bit of purchasing power each year — as necessary to lubricate the gears of commerce.
What they don’t seem to understand (or would like the rest of us not to understand) is that inflation is also a tool for redistributing wealth from one class to another. It pushes up the prices of stocks, bonds, and real estate, enriching the owners of those assets while making day-to-day life a lot harder for people who live paycheck to paycheck.
This obviously makes the victims mad.
Say you’re 28 years old in today’s America and you’d like the kind of starter house that your parents bought at a similar age. You’ve cobbled a couple of part-time jobs into 40 hours a week and make, in dollar terms, pretty much what your parents did 30 years ago. But the $90,000 house they bought back in the day is now $300,000, which is orders of magnitude beyond your means.
What do you do? You rent, of course, with exactly zero chance of ever buying because your part-time jobs don’t offer a path to middle-class money.
The story is the same for health care, college tuition, food, cars, and pretty much everything else. The life that was easily accessible for your parents in the 1990s is out of reach for you.
Here’s a 20-something American explaining their situation:
https://rubino.substack.com/p/from-the-archives-this-is-what-inflation