What! Nah, we just gonna deal with that shaking
I'm going to upgrade from cigarettes to donuts when my tax return comes back.
You are wrong, sir. That was FREE money being handed out. In 2020-2022ish. You must be missing something in your calculations.
We paid folks more not to work than they had ever made working & just could not figure out the reasons that we couldn't get anybody to work nor the reason the demand for retail products increased exponentially! As a country, we met the enemy every time we looked in the mirror.
Hopefully they changed out the summer air for winter air and refilled the horn and blinker fluid. I get them to throw in a bucket of prop wash, chem light batteries and some grid squares as lagniappe.
Curious conclusion to draw from my comments. Or curious application of this pic for me and not everyone else complaining.
The alternative was a recession at least on par or probably worse that the 2008-2011 great recession, with a depression very much in the mix. Clearly, they overshot it but I do think we're collectively forgetting the level of uncertainty EVERYONE had for basically the entirety of 2020 and it appears we're getting away from it with a recession-free soft landing. (I know we had a technical recession one quarter there at some point).
I think they also do patches for free too? They got me out of a nine line bind in Dallas back during that big winter storm in 2021, and wouldn't charge me anything. Discount Tire is a solid outfit in my book.
They also actually have decent prices on tires, too. They've been my go to recently because of their extra services and their prices.
The "economy" is hundreds of billions of transactions on a daily basis that overtime reaches something like an equilibrium. But you helicopter a bunch of cash in and that equilibrium is going to be disturbed in unpredictable ways. Younger workers that were in a position to switch jobs at the drop of a hat were generally big winners on the income side. Older workers with a lot of company specific knowledge were mostly screwed unless they were willing to make a pretty big bluff or had good owners. I think providers of luxury goods and services were winners because so much of the money went to people that were owners or self employed and were already well off or rich. I think people on the commodities side were winners b/c the inflation has to go somewhere. Real estate owners for the same reason, except for those concentrated in office space in urban centers (more because of remote work than the money). People with long term fixed debt were big winners obviously and holders of long term fixed debt were losers (although that was easy enough to predict).
I think your 1st paragraph is a pretty good summation, but I'm not sure how the concluding sentence goes with it?
Sure- most lost big then most now lose small.
Gotta buy the sale, playboy. that gets your cost down to $4 a twelve pack. Yes, having to buy 60 cans of coke is a PITA.
The conclusion is somewhat out of my *** conjecture. But while I don't think where we were was "the" equilibrium that we are inevitably going to get back to, I do think most people are going to end up roughly near the same place they started after a while. I say lost a little because I still don't quite believe the wage data and inflation data. I think the inflation data is understating waht people have actually experienced and I think something about the skew in the wage data is messing something up. But that's just a suspicion.
I don't think it's zero sum, so I don't think most losing big and then small means other people won (I think on the whole we were net losers), but absolutely some people got huge windfalls. Congress basically used the pandemic as an excuse to hand out a bunch of goodies with no concern about who would bear the cost of them and with no real concern about whether the people receiving them were impacted by the government's covid response. Some small business owners were completely devastated with no justification (granted mainly by state and local governments) and others, who didn't shut down for a day, to PPP and then ERC. There were people with relatively small businesses that got my entire networth in handouts from the government between PPP and ERC. People with bigger business that are still classified as small got multiples of my networth handed to them.
Yeah...I was really just referring to significant shareholders and execs in companies that were able to increase their prices due to uncertainty and higher operating expenses, and then continue to keep prices high even as costs fell. Its been wild to see.
Tires are so freaking expensive that keeping the ones you have commands a premium, I suppose.
I just bought a set of tires at Discount Tire. I had to pay an installation fee, but it includes lifetime balancing and flat repair.
Each time I get tires(its been 2 years)...
Discount Tire is owned by Tire Rack. And yes, they fix flats free (the right way - patch on the inside) for free, regardless of where you bought the tires. And they only do tires, not alignments. The only up-sale, which is fairly recent, is wiper blades but even then they don't push it.
