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thinking about how the majority of people would react to the phrase "$100 sneakers" as if they just heard "gold-plated toilet" when $100 is a piddling worthless sum and $50 shoes disintegrate within two weeks but most americans sense of finances is tuned to 1980s-era inflation
like here are some things the majority of people don't understand - $100 is the minimum price basically anything durable (e.g. not consumable) should cost at the current value of the dollar - $60,000 is not a large number for public projects. nothing less than $10,000,000 is.
spending less than $100 on a kitchen appliance, for instance, means it will probably break within two years and likely be shitty in the meantime spending $60k on anything as a govt. of any scale is literally meaningless. it's nothing. it's $0. it's like buying a pretzel.
in 1980 these were different numbers. politicians etc have done a pretty good job of keeping people thinking in at least 30-40 year old economic terms, and this is a lot of what keeps the GOP successful
when people hear that it'll cost *tens of millions* to e.g. solve homelessness in a city they react with shock because they have no idea what things cost. they just don't. they just don't know. they don't know how much waste treatment or installing streetlamps sets us back.
wages completely failing to keep up with inflation is just the most nightmarish concept. it wrecks things in such an incredible way, it's just *unbelievable* how far the ramifications go. it pervades everything.
employers pinch pennies so hard that they won't hire anyone they can't wring maximum overproductivity out of, so people end up unemployed. a broke person steals a $50 item from another, and that person is so angry they call the cops and the "thief" is murdered
you stand 100ft away from this and you see a person having another person killed because they feel *so deprived* by the loss of what should be a worthless item that they'll kill another abused, downtrodden person over it. over something that should be disposable to them.
when I talk about how little money $100 is, people get mad at me. "that's a lot of money to me!" yes, to *you* it is, and it is to me, and it's not our fault that it feels like a lot but it *is* wrong. that's not a lot of money. the buying power of $100 is shit. it's nothing.
but the big inflation lie is successful because the manufacturers work days and nights to make things cheap that shouldn't be. a ps4 shouldn't be $300. that's not enough money for what it is. the buying power of $300 doesn't pay for the materials and labor.
a ps4 should be $1000. it should not be something you can afford easily on the *current wages* of retail jobs, and the takeaway isn't "get a better job," it's "$11/hr is an inhumanely small wage because that doesn't buy anything in the local or global economy"
i constantly say that nothing costs the right amount except things that look overpriced. soda *should* cost $9 for a 12-pack because $9 *should* be pennies to all of us. we shouldn't care about $9. the dollar is the new nickel. but everyone's being paid in fucking nickels.
so, anyway. one of the biggest challenges we face as a society is recalibrating the broader public's idea of what things cost so that they understand how cheap many important solutions are, so politicians can't kill all public projects by quoting piddly sums
I'm not sure how to do this. TV ads and billboards? maybe we can pass legislation that no politician is allowed to quote a cost figure without comparing it to understandable necessities.
maybe it would take the punch out if they weren't allowed to say "the gentleman from Delaware wants to spend TEN MILLION DOLLARS to build homeless shelters" without ending it with "which is what it costs to purify water in San Francisco for four months"
day in day out i find myself thinking that we need a branch of the judicial system whose entire business is to independantly rate whether shit politicians said was Completely Fucking Unfair and summarily remove them from office
"good morning to everyone except <person who fucked up>" meme except it's "first amendment to everyone except politicians"
i also think it should be considered treason to imply that taxes as a whole are bad. you can attack a single tax but if you stray too far into suggesting the problem is *the idea of having a society* it's straight to the gallows
$100 is not a piddling worthless sum for many, many people
at the value of the dollar *it should be* is my point. people are getting paid pennies on the dollar, so "buying $100 shoes" looks like a splurge when *that is what usable shoes cost*
Not even to mention the racial implications that old white boomers think about when they think of young poor teens buying nice shoes
yeah the full form of my observation was "white people don't think about the cost of clothes until they're looking to criticize a black person, so they start itemizing the prices of their possessions and when they hit on "shoes - $100" it sounds like so much money"
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