In addition, with inflation at or above 2%, the average person needs to see a substantial hike in their wages to keep pace with their current standard of living.

Inflation is what happens when there is a shortage of labor and thus inflation is generally associated with increased incomes. This stupid myth that CPI inflation is bad for workers should die. Your comment is also wrong that inflation is above 2%. If that were the case nobody would have gotten angry that assets have outpaced wage growth. Assets outpacing wage growth is deflation except it is not denominated in dollars but rather in housing or stocks.

No, the fantasy economy (read the stock or housing market being pumped by easy money) should not be part of the CPI inflation rate because it's not real. The entire point of CPI inflation is to measure the real economy.

Supply side economics are generally done to combat inflation, demand side economics are generally done to increase inflation and what we need is a stimulus on the demand side because there is already an oversupply of labor.

Inflation is only 2% because CPI is bullshit. CPI keeps getting changed so it would be 2%. There are no realistic housing options in there anymore, nor education, nor healthcare, nor ... and if you reinsert those inflation has never been below 4% per year.

While I've gotten above inflation pay rises, they have been exceptions (and due to exceptional performance, ie. usually more than 8h/day for quite a while).

Besides, it is very obvious that modern states and central banks are using inflation to minimize/eliminate the effect of debts on the actual economy. Given what has been going on, how can you realistically defend any other position?

Btw: given what has happened to these debts, you can safely bet your right arm that real inflation is going up to at least 5.3%. And that was before COVID-19 measures.

The problem with this is taking it as a law of nature rather than an observed behavior over a specific period of history. And notably one with a stark lack of antitrust enforcement.

Suppose you bust up monopolies and require companies to compete with each other. Then prices go down, which increases growth (lower price, higher demand), but decreases return on capital (lower margins). Is r > g still true then? Maybe not. I say we try it and find out.

But yes, I agree, the whole idea of pointing out r > g is to advocate for policy changes that would counteract this. The question is which policies? It's easy to say "break up monopolies", much harder to devise elegant countermeasures that align interests across the whole spectrum and are robust to defection.

Here's a simple and elegant countermeasure. Don't allow people to inherit more than say $50M with an extremely progressive estate tax.

The estate tax is a joke because it can be avoided through tax planning.

The theory is that Richard Rich dies and then little Richie inherits the money but would lose 90% of it to the tax.

What happens in practice is that when Richie is 18 years old he launches a company with a loan from his parents in the same line of business where they have expertise and contacts so that 20 years later he's a billionaire in his own right.

Meanwhile all the usual tax avoidance strategies are happening with jurisdictional arbitrage and transfer pricing and self-dealing so that by the time the parents retire they still have all they need for a lavish retirement but the bulk of their assets have already been transferred to their children at a low tax rate.

The problem isn't inheritance. It isn't taxes at all. It's market consolidation and regulatory capture which yields regulations that favor big businesses over small ones and incumbents over upstarts.

Because small business and competition are the ways growth flows to the little guy.

It's not as simple as you make it sound. In every sane tax system, donations (even loans with lower than usual interest rates) are taxed just like inheritance. Of course, getting a million dollar loan at all makes a huge difference. But it's still no guarantee to build a successful business. The point is to make it a lot harder to bequeath obscene amounts of wealth.

But it's not donations at all. It's, you vouch for this person with a customer who trusts you and correspondingly awards them a billion dollar contract. You take them on as a customer or supplier in a business with 4% margins, so that a 4% difference here and there on what prices you negotiate with them can shift ~100% of your profits to them. You teach them trade secrets that only successful companies in that line of business are privy to.

There are a thousand ways to do it that don't show up on any tax form, and trying to exclude some only causes people to invent new ones.

The real way to fix it is to make it easier for newcomers to compete with the incumbents so the incumbent companies fail or maintain thin margins and new ones are created at a fast enough rate that it's rare for them to exist at a large scale for generations on end to enable the long-term accumulation of capital.

Fruit at the grocery store has increased 30% in just the past few months.

Apples used to be $0.99/pound. Now it’s $1.29/pound.

I’ve seen other basic food commodities also increase 50%. This is the fastest rate increase that I’ve seen in quite a while, if ever.

The only saving grace is that I’m not commuting to work. But the savings from gasoline, just went straight into groceries. Hence, practically no savings at all.

I’m not looking forward to when we must go back into the office, and then everything still remains at the higher prices.

I would need to demand a raise or a promotion to match up with the inflation.

That's not how inflation works or is determined. Instead go to your country's office for statistics Web site.

FWIW, here that's 0.3% inflation on food and non-alcoholic beverages, 1.3% in total from 2020-06 to 2020-12. Both numbers are ordinary/close to expected.

To see an inflation of 30%, I have to take the difference to 2007.

As you can imagine people claim this doesn't reflect true inflation as we're not necessarily comparing apples-to-apples (ha!) and it also excludes energy costs.

It would be false if somehow this became an infinite treadmill where the basket went from beef to chicken to lentils to sawdust, but that's not what happens. The substition smooths out short term changes in price the same way people actually do.

The economy acquires robustness through this redundancy, and the CPI measure reflects that. It's far from a perfect measure, but its failures aren't caused by the perfectly commonplace action of buying the cheapest goods today. Insisting that it has to be precisely the same goods would indeed be a distorted measure of the economy.

I didn’t say it was 30% across the board. I just claimed I was seeing a 30% price increase, for one product item.

Now, you can choose to not buy that item, in which case, the price increase doesn’t impact you.

A great example of this is the mass replacement of butter and olive oil with the much cheaper soybean oil or canola oil. Just try to find bread (on the bread aisle) or mayonnaise that doesn't contain soybean oil. Even the mayonnaise specifically branded as OLIVE OIL! simply has olive oil blended with soybean oil.

How does that fluctuation match seasonal fluctuations from other years (weighted by weather conditions)?

Glad to see people have a chance to play the game and discover some of the angles. A lot of people could learnn to do way better than just 'let it ride'.

If you think things are working as intended right now, you haven't been paying attention.