> was mostly ephemeral (look at inflation in car/house prices).

It was driven largely by real estate appreciation. How do you figure that this is ephemeral?

Your second paragraph contradicts your first. America's policy in 2020 was decisively _not_ neoliberal, and was in fact one of the most generous in the world[1]. This is in part due to necessity borne of a smaller safety net than other OECD countries, but it's a huge mistake to interpret this as simply canceling out the scope of the fiscal action; at the very least, describing a government capable of specific spending bills at this scale and reach as committed to neoliberal orthodoxy is ridiculous.

Similarly, "neoliberalism" is an absurd description of an administration whose agenda is based on the increasing acceptance of steady-state gargantuan deficit spending (as we begin to cautiously accept that inflation is not appearing to nearly the degree we've feared for the last decade).

There's a large contingent out there engaging in a combination of wishful thinking and blind extrapolation of an outdated impression of USGov fiscal habits. It's a good fit for a post-truth world (I've lost count of the number of dumb friends who think that the extent of covid fiscal relief was a flat $600/1200 payment). But HN hasn't quite reached that level of disconnection with reality, so let's not steer it that way..

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-52450...

Come on! Real estate appreciation only matters for people that own multiple properties and can therefore afford to sell without compromising the roof over their heads, i.e. landlords.

My sole property doubling in value, along with every other house in comparable neighborhoods, is 100% ephemeral, because there is no way to realize that value without liquidating my family's quality of life--a counterproductive maneuver.

**

Trump Admin was paradoxically nationalist at home and neoliberal abroad (probably because he's a professional clown with no understanding of governance); US foreign policy has not meaningfully changed since 1991/2001. It's all about securing the conditions for global neoliberalism, i.e. American military and financial imperialism, which ensures I can buy a jar of premium African tree nuts from Costco for a fraction of an hours labor, even though it required many hours of labor to produce.

Anyway, that pyramid scheme called neoliberalism is collapsing, and it's only going to get worse domestically in America as a sad but necessary result.

>because there is no way to realize that value without liquidating my family's quality of life

not really. you can reverse mortgage it when you retire.

Plus, the idea that your level of living expenses is completely immutable is idiotic. Obviously people don't turn over housing at the drop of a hat, but sitting on extra tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars isn't worthless: homeowners do move, and large increases in a leveraged asset mean even minor downsizing in one's home can allow large increases in other expenses.

> Outside the West, 2020 represented the decisive death of neoliberalism. No one is looking to America for the future anymore.

Interestingly, even America had its only explicitly-anti-neoliberal (in rhetoric, at the very least) President in the last 3+ decades in office at the time. Think what you will of him—I certainly have some thoughts—he was notable for that highly unusual, for a national-level US politician with the backing of a major party, policy stance.

That aspect of that particular phenomenon hasn't received a ton of attention (to be fair, there was a lot of stuff to focus on) so I'm not sure whether it represents any kind of trend, but neoliberal policies are actually fairly unpopular among voters across the board, though very popular among leadership in the two major US political parties for quite some time.

He got elected on a reactionary populist platform, and if he (or Bannon, rather) had any desire to shift American policy, he inevitably got discouraged from doing so by Washington's unelected bureaucracy. So he ended up using his largely ceremonial 4 years of power to enrich his family and friends.