grrrrrbox
Cars are actually a great example. $30k will set you up with a Camry hybrid for >20 years. If you can only afford to finance a $15k econobox, you'll end up paying extra on interest, maintenance, and fuel while your car spends more time in the shop.
IMO this theory gets unfairly maligned by a strawman of "price == quality".
Frankly, the left should start to go lower, and speak more emotionally. It turns out that clinical, sterile statements are not a good way to sway a majority, and they don't make good sound-bites.
At some point, you have to fight fire with fire to avoid becoming yet another victim of the paradox of tolerance.
Step 1: Organization holds endless multi-hour meetings about intractable organizational issues.
Step 2: Stakeholders go to a bar to drink heavily and commissarate.
Step 3: Uninhibited stakeholders decide on a way to ignore the inscrutable organizational issues and Just Do It.
Step 4: Organization pats itself on the back for another successful round of all-day meetings.
Sort of a variation on the classic "beatings will continue until morale improves" strategy.
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
I wonder if they could have suffered from the supply crunch. Last I checked, 5-year-old Corollas were pushing $20k, and a new base model is about the same price.
Anecdotally, I checked Carvana and local dealers when I was looking for a car recently, because I usually buy $5k beaters and drive them into the ground. This time, it didn't make sense to risk a lemon when I could get a bumper-to-bumper warranty for the same price. So I waited until I could find something new at MSRP, and that was that.