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277 points cebert | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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PostOnce ◴[] No.44361768[source]
Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less)

However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later.

At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses.

i.e., credit can buy time in the nearly literal sense, you can do an hour's work in half an hour because the money facilitates it, meaning you can now make more money. If instead of investing in work you're spending on play, then you end up with a time deficit.

or, e.g. you can buy 3 franchises in 3 months instead of 3 years (i.e. income from the 1 franchise), trading credit for time to make more money, instead of burning it. It'd have been nice had they taught me this in school.

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lm28469 ◴[] No.44364104[source]
> the average person is using

The "average person" is told from birth to consume as many things and experiences as possible as it if was the only thing that could give their life a meaning. The entire system is based on growth and consumption, I have a hard time blaming "the average person"

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ljm ◴[] No.44366742[source]
Wages for the average person (working class) typically remain stagnant while cost of living increases, particularly through inflation. I imagine minimum wage would be 25-30 bucks an hour if it did track inflation and that would only serve to keep your purchasing power constant.

Credit, in this sense, is also used to solve a cash flow problem. It’s a bad sign when that credit (or Klarna Pay-in-3 style setups) is applied to basic day to day expenses like buying groceries or other necessities.

Basically the market’s answer to increasing poverty: you’re not getting paid more, so how about we give you a payment plan to spread things out?

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1. 9rx ◴[] No.44367007[source]
> Wages for the average person (working class) typically remain stagnant while cost of living increases, particularly through inflation.

If wages were stagnant, nominally, you'd be making like 25¢ per hour. Wages are stagnant[1] only in real terms (i.e. adjusted for inflation). Cost of living and inflation are very different concepts, but since you indicate that inflation is responsible for most of the cost of living increases, wages have kept pace anyway, so...

[1] Technically not even. Wages are growing faster than inflation, but the margins are small enough that we accept calling it stagnant as a close enough approximation.