7 ms·

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got chea

• CGMthrowaway 3mo ago
  >this is all downstream of structural incentives You are mostly right and the structural incentives are more related at root to unsustainable national debt than any legislative choice (unless that's what you were referring to)
  • __MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
    Nothing to do with poisoning the non-AI parts of the economy to drive investment in AI? Its not like this bubble was gonna blow itself. It's clear that there's plenty of money to go around. It's just that none of it is being spent on things that improve people's lives, mostly due to corruption.
    • paxys 3mo ago
      These problems have existed since well before AI.
      • __MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
        Sure, it's only the most recent example of how lopsided economies like ours cyclically shoot themselves in the foot.
  • inigyou 3mo ago
    I don't see how. National debt is just a form of money-printing. And it has to equal private savings.
    • amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
      Not necessarily local savings though. Savings from other countries works just fine.
  • rawgabbit 3mo ago
    I don’t follow your logic. The recent legislative choice by the current administration is continued tax breaks, corporate tax holidays, and capricious tariffs. There is no serious discussion about the debt.
    • spwa4 3mo ago
      Nobody spends like republicans. Trump increased the national debt by $7.8 trillion in his first term (rising from ~$19.9 trillion at inauguration to ~$27.75 trillion when he left office), 39% increase (more than WW2, the Manhattan project and the Moon landing combined) Each and every US citizen will be required to pay $22,400 for the (ahem) accomplishments of Trump's first term. So far in his second term, Trump has added $3.2 trillion so far, if you calculate by the end of his second term it will be about $8.8 trillion. Each and every US citizen will be required to pay $25,000 for his accomplishments now. For comparison: you owe $9,200 for Barack Obama's last term, and $20,300 for Joe Biden's term. Oh and Clinton was by far the cheapest president since WW2, increasing the debt by a measly $600 during his 2nd term.
      • rawgabbit 3mo ago
        [flagged]
• rayiner 3mo ago
  > Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. BLS says housing, transportation, and food are the top 3. Insurance/pensions is #4, but that also includes car and homeowners insurance and retirement contributions. Over the past 50 years, both transportation and food got cheaper. Moreover, clothing actually used to be one of the top categories, but that’s fallen off completely.
  • rawgabbit 3mo ago
    I have a hard time believing healthcare expenses is not in the top three.
    • daemonologist 3mo ago
      It might be that a lot of the cost doesn't show up in the data because it comes out of your paycheck before it's "yours," in the form of your employer's contribution to health insurance premiums. (Anecdotally this is true for me - "my" portion of premiums would not be in the top three, but the total premiums are #2 after housing (for a while when I had roommates they were #1, which is ridiculous).) (BLS gets this data from surveys: https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cex/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cex/home.htm )
      • rayiner 3mo ago
        Correct. You can argue this is money that you’d otherwise get if it wasn’t going to healthcare, and that’s a fair point. But then you have to count that in the top line income.
  • smallmancontrov 3mo ago
    I should have said "mandatory expense inflation", yes. There are still some difficult problems the economy is making progress on, but the correct attitude towards those is "keep up the good work" and to focus our attention back on the parts which are robbing us of progress as fast as we make it, where costs soar in excess of wage increases: health care, housing, and education.
• GodelNumbering 3mo ago
  > undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive Well said. Being told that 'you should be happy without owning' to a party that can't afford to own by another party who is actively scooping up the same resource can feel extremely invalidating. My personal take is that a lot of support for contemporary political extremism in many countries comes from the fact that a significant portion of population is pissed off and see no realistic chance of the 'settle down and thrive' life, not because they are racist/prejudiced or whatever (although labeling them as such only makes things more extreme)
  • forgotaccount3 3mo ago
    > Being told that 'you should be happy without owning' to a party that can't afford to own by another party who is actively scooping up the same resource can feel extremely invalidating. It's not really coming from those though? At the same time that housing costs have ballooned, we've also had a significant migration back to cities. When a larger % of the population are living in high density locations you are going to naturally have a larger % not owning homes. Owning your own home does not align with the density required for a city to function. At the least, narrowing down the topic to 'Why do people rent instead of own a condo?' is a much more meaningful topic over 'Why do people rent instead of own a SFH?' since a condo is a more viable option in locations where most of the renters are.
    • repeekad 3mo ago
      Why does being in a city “naturally” mean less home ownership? More demand and higher prices yes, but you also should be earning more and dense housing projects should be trivial to justify. It’s legislation all the way down, politicians protect the interests of the wealthy who want to rent seek regardless of location. Look at how mamdani got a common sense luxury home tax in NYC, before that ultra wealthy owned multiple homes just because they could.
      • mauvehaus 3mo ago
        Because multi-family buildings (required for higher density) come with more complicated ownership models. Owner occupied triple deckers in Boston, for example, often come with their own condo associations because there needs to be some way to handle the shared maintenance and expenses. That's for a three unit building. Now scale that to a twenty or one hundred unit building. At some point, it makes sense for a single entity to handle the common maintenance through outright ownership and rent. Individual families have the flexibility to leave if things suck without being financially tied to the building long-term and subject to changes in housing prices. Yes, moving as a renter is expensive. It's still lower cost and friction than moving as an owner. Source: rented for years in cities. Now happily a homeowner in the hinterlands of Vermont.
• jenniferhooley 3mo ago
  Or we just wait for automation and robotics to make building housing much cheaper and the free market system to fix things - which 5 years ago I assumed was too far out, but with all the advances in the sector, seems like we might get significantly cheaper building costs within the next 10 years or so.
  • inigyou 3mo ago
    The cost of housing mostly isn't in the building. If it was, we'd just build smaller and have houses. But you can't because the land costs too much.
    • win311fwg 3mo ago
      Why would you build a small new home when you can buy a large used home for the same price?
      • moate 3mo ago
        1- Costs of operating an larger house are higher than a smaller house 2- Yearly maintenance of a new house is cheaper than an older house (older the house, the greater this gets) 3- Easier to keep a smaller house tidy 4- Mobility/lifestyle issues. 5- Indifference towards resale value Not everyone wants a giant house, and plenty of people like a small one. It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it.
        • win311fwg 3mo ago
          I don't think anyone is talking about giant houses. Last time I priced a new 1,500 sq ft home they wanted over $800,000. That was an instant nope from me. Another commenter pointed out that their 650 sq ft home would be $400,000 to build new. These are already beyond most people's affordability even before considering the cost of the land. So when we talk about small and affordable we're talking more like 100 sq ft. Large compared to that is what most would call a modest home.
• kakacik 3mo ago
  > Health care, housing, and education In Europe its only housing, and still proportionally cheaper than what US has, often in higher quality for older homes (bricks / concrete vs cheap creaky wooden houses). The idea of saving massive amounts for my kids potential university studies is ridiculous to me. Same for any health issue. I mean any health issue as long as I can work, and then social state takes over (that is not ideal but at point nothing is). This is also how happiness can be defined - lack of (much shorter list of) constant worries and pressures to deliver, sustain etc.
  • CalRobert 3mo ago
    Concrete houses suck and Europeans need to get off their high house about them. I own a concrete brick house in Europe and I’d strongly prefer a wooden American one. It’s hard to insulate, hard to alter, uglier, has a terrible embodied carbon footprint, has too much thermal mass, and alterations that would make it more livable (like having eaves) are illegal.
    • BeetleB 3mo ago
      On the flip side, window AC's are really effective at cooling the single room they're in. In the wooden house I have, I just can't get the room that cool if the temperature is in the 90's, because the internal walls provide very little insulation. It was trivial when I lived in concrete buildings. It's a ridiculous waste to have to use central air conditioning to cool a whole house when I really just need to cool 1-2 rooms.
      • CalRobert 3mo ago
        OK, but window AC and also mini and multi split systems, which are also like this, work just fine in wooden houses, so I don’t see the connection. I had multi splits in a wooden house in Ireland. Edit: re-reading… I guess it depends on the house but I definitely have had a substantial temp difference between rooms in a wooden house
        • 3mo ago
• huijzer 3mo ago
  > I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that “You have lies, damned lies, and then you have statistics”
• testing22321 3mo ago
  > Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives In every developed country two of those are basic human rights, and you get them free even if you’ve never worked simply because you don’t want to. Every developed country except one, that is.
  • cpburns2009 3mo ago
    All of those are free to the poor in the US with our very generous welfare to the bottom and top percentiles.
    • testing22321 3mo ago
      What a shame it’s not for everyone
    • qlte 3mo ago
      * assuming you don’t live in a state with a Medicaid work requirement/disqualified by earning “too much” as working poor, and lucky enough/have dependents to win a Section 8 voucher from the lottery after waiting for months to years
      • cpburns2009 3mo ago
        I agree the working class gets screwed over as usual.
  • Gormo 3mo ago
    It's not possible for any of these to be "basic human rights", regardless of what rhetoric may be employed by states seeking to assert centralized political control over their provision. Goods and services that must be actively supplied by other people cannot be rights. Rights are norms that protect people's inherent rights unto themselves as baseline rules we use to negotiate society in the first place. They can't pertain to things that can only be obtained within society.
• francisofascii 3mo ago
  > Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. Definitely true for my household. The mortgage, college for the kids, and health insurance for a family takes up a huge amount. Not to mention the housing expenses like HVAC fixes, trash collection, sewer, utilities, etc.
• ffsm8 3mo ago
  luxeries also haven't gotten cheap, really - their manufacturing has been outsourced into places which often don't pay decent wages - so it's just out of sight/out of mind. We're currently living in a time where some of the issues are being hidden by the nature of a global market - it's friggin impossible to make any good analysis with a global market, it has just too many influences and ways to hide criteria...
• Gormo 3mo ago
  It's not a coincidence that the three sectors you mention are the three most heavily regulated and subject to political intervention in the US, all with schizophrenic policy frameworks that simultaneously restrict supply and subsidize demand.
• mrguyorama 3mo ago
  Industrialized agriculture drove the cost of food from 50% of a normal person's income hundreds of years ago to like 5% now. The problem is that after a few centuries of relatively good times, structures have been built up so that the owners of assets can claw back all that income again. They are using housing as the sink for all that wealth, because land can't be industrialized. They want us to be peasants again.