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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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The economy is basically the stand-in for God for many people in modern consumerist America. I'm saying that they don't know what they're talking about, and that they would be happy with even less material wealth if they were spiritually sound.

If you read the article, Scott tears all the economic arguments to pieces. Even housing is not really THAT expensive, and you can own a house on less than $100k combined income in a decent area if you don't blow your money and spend wisely. I don't buy the economic arguments at all.

"Even housing is not really THAT expensive, and you can own a house on less than $100k combined income in a decent area if you don't blow your money and spend wisely."

Absolutely not, not even close. I don't even live in a particularly expensive area - Hampton Roads - and 100k combined would be far beyond my ability to afford. Where are you people pulling these numbers from? No, Scott did not "tear the economic arguments to shreds;" he, like you, are just naively accepting blatantly fraudulent employment and inflation numbers as gospel truth, and demanding I believe you and not my empty bank account.

Absolutely not, not even close. I don't even live in a particularly expensive area - Hampton Roads - and 100k combined would be far beyond my ability to afford.

Scott's saying that if you made $100k (or some undefined amount less), you could afford to buy a house. Which seems to be true in the area of Hampton Roads.

he, like you, are just naively accepting blatantly fraudulent employment and inflation numbers as gospel truth

As Scott points out

Every so often, someone makes a site with a name like TruthStats.org claiming that all government economic statistics are lies, and inflation is 10,000% higher than reported.

It's never true, these sites typically turn out to be either numbers pulled out of the person's ass or government statistics plus some factor pulled out of the person's ass. The latest figures may be suspect (because they're based on incomplete data) but outside of that the stats are actually pretty good.

Dude, this is where I live. I see the house listings, I know what I can be approved for in a home loan, and I know i can never even save up enough for a down payment on 100k a year. Why do people insist on telling me to stop believing my lying eyes?

Because you could just be bad at math. Or finance.

The other thing is that people aren't comparing like for like. NYC in the 1960s was a much smaller city than NYC today. If you look at similar sized cities as NYC was in the 60s today the pricing of housing in a similar area in real terms is basically the same as it was in NYC in the 60s.

EDIT: This is wrong.

The second largest city in the US, by population, is Los Angeles, at 3.9 million to NYCs 8.5 million. NYC's population in the 1960s was about 7.8 million, considerably larger than Los Angeles today. There are no US cities of similar size to New York City in the 1960s today, so your comment is utter nonsense that you obviously didn't even bother to check.

IIRC the population of Manhattan specifically is down substantially over the last century, even if NYC has grown slightly as a whole. It's hard to compare like-to-like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan

Manhattan's population is down a lot since the 1920s, but it's about equal to the 1960s population.

so your comment is utter nonsense that you obviously didn't even bother to check

Fair enough, I remember reading something like this somewhere on the internet a few years ago and so brought it up. I fully accept that I didn't even bother to check, and yes, I should have done that.

Let nobody say that I don't admit to making bad points when I actually make bad points.

Props, man.

Eh, technically true, but Manhattan in particular was more populous and much more dense in the first half of the 20th century. Not that anyone really wants to go back to that level of housing quality, though.

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