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The poor only see their already low incomes declining because there's an implicit assumption that wages can't be increased to compensate.

The usual narrative is that if wages were increased, that would be 'inflationary.'

It's worse than that.

  • Even if wages are indexed by general inflation, it often happens that the price of products bought by the poor inflate much faster.

  • When the pension system is based on the fiction that people save while they work and live on the savings once retired (rather than be earnest, risk the explicit social confrontation, ditch the Ponzi scheme and treat pensions as one segment of the contributions from working people to non-working people), poor pensioners are at a risk, too. If pension is provided by the state, the state may or may not index by inflation (it didn't in post-1989 former East Bloc countries); if pensions are provided by private funds, those can, no, will lose big when their investments provide the fuel for the next asset inflation bubble.

So, again, I am not convinced that inflation is automatically bad for the wealthy and good for the poor.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.
by DoDo on Sat Nov 20th, 2010 at 10:39:30 AM EST
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