Again, thanks.
Wouldn't this be true when interest rates are fixed only? People with variable rates will suffer as interest rates tend to spike during inflation and drive bankruptcy.
Also given wages lag inflation, the debt cost proceeds the payback.
So it feels a mixed case of, this will make some people loose out significantly, but those that can see the other side do well.
Wages only lag inflation if you stick with one job. If you're forever job-hopping, you get the new wage as soon as you land the new job, which could be within weeks.
Yes, this means that you have an incentive to never do any actual work and instead spend the time immediately looking for a new job. This is one of the positive feedback loops that turns inflation into hyperinflation and state failure. With everyone incentivized to look for new work rather than do the old work they signed up for, no actual work gets done. This exacerbates shortages, which causes further price hikes, which increases inflation, which means people have even more of an incentive to take very short jobs and not do them. It also prevents the formation of capital stock - nobody can get good at a job, or train on some expensive piece of machinery, if they need to take a new job tomorrow. That's why there's this compression of time horizons in countries undergoing inflationary episodes, where everything becomes focused around surviving until tomorrow rather than building for the long-term.
Also regarding job hopping, that may be true but taking a macro view of the world, most people don't or can't job hop that often, so I feel this is more the exception that the rule.
Generally I'm not convinced debt is a good thing during inflation as a broad rule. I feel it's more there are good exceptions if the right conditions align but this is not true to the average.
The main winners of inflation are:
Adaptive over passive. As you mentioned, the average blue-collar wage growth always lags behind inflation. We aren't really seeing white-collar wage inflation either in the U.S. right now though - fast food workers are making $22/hour and Amazon drivers $18/hour, but FAANG engineers are getting laid off. Who are the winners then? The people who swap jobs or swap industries into ones with pricing power, or who found new businesses enabled by changing price structures. What we're seeeing in the U.S. now (with ~5% wage inflation) is that the 80% of wage earners who stay put at their job are getting ~0% raises, while the people switching are getting ~20% raises.
Debtors over savers. This is well documented in econ textbooks - inflation is a transfer of wealth from savers to debtors, because debtors can pay back their debts with less valuable money.
Governments over citizens. Partially this is because of government usually being a net debtor if it gets into a position where inflation happens, and partially it's because of the government's power to issue new currency. Plus tax revenue is usually a percentage of economic activity, so if all prices & wages increase by a certain percentage, so do tax revenues (and the government can bracket-creep you into higher tax brackets).
Poor people usually fare worse than rich people because of the adaptive vs. passive bulletpoint - they have fewer options and less awareness of options than richer people do. But the debtors-over-savers effect works in their favor: poor people usually have higher debts than rich people, and inflation is a form of debt jubilee. If, for example, they jump into a fast-growing new business started because of inflation (like Microsoft or Apple Computer in the 70s) it could be their ticket out of poverty.