> why when the average low-income American is in nominal debt at fixed interest rates [0] that HN thinks inflation is bad for them
Many reasons. Monetary inflation doesn't just lead to devaluation of the currency - it doesn't just hurt lenders and holders of dollars. Monetary inflation extract Seigniorage from the people. Prices rise before wages, leading the poor to get poorer. The money is used by banks to extract interest from people they give loans to. Read my other comments on this thread tho. I'd rather not rehash it yet again.
Source? This Chart [0] seems to show they at least move in tandem (with wages maybe having the slight first mover edge).
>The money is used by banks to extract interest from people they give loans to
Again, I think you're poorly sourced. As sourced in the last comment, in the bottom 50% of US households, credit card debt is 50% of total debt (higher for lower percentiles, but the FED doesn't break that out), and as this chart [1] shows, credit card debt is priced independent of inflation.
Where are banks using inflation to exploit the working class, exactly?
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=EK2n [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=EK2k
* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sticky-wage-theory.asp
Store prices can be adjusted as often as once a week, but wages are generally adjusted only a couple times per year. So it makes sense that wages lag prices.
> This Chart [0] seems to show they at least move in tandem
They should move in tandem at wide granularities. But there's way too much noise in the chart to really be sure of anything from it. CPI is constantly tweaked, so its hard to even give much meaning to how the line moves throughout this chart. And why just hourly earnings here? There's lots of places that look like one leads the other and vice versa, but it may just be noise. There's too many confounding variables.
> Where are banks using inflation to exploit the working class, exactly?
No? My argument is gold is a wildly impractical currency that does not align with the goals of contemporary society (new supply is randomly distributed to land owners, its extraction ruins valuable natural resources, it requires a significant amount of fossil fuels to move, etc.)
I really wonder, why when the average low-income American is in nominal debt at fixed interest rates [0] that HN thinks inflation is bad for them (it is in fact bad for upper middle class savers like the majority of HN, so maybe that's why).
[0]https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...