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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   1616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I don't see how the US will ever be a manufacturing country when a house for an engineer in a city is a million dollars, medical insurance for a family is 2000+ dollars a month and an engineering degree starts at 100k dollars. Being a country built on assets being inflated to the moon is incompatible with manufacturing.

China wanted its bubble to pop because BYD's engineers can rent condos for far less per square meter than what GM engineers can.

Further more the US birthrate is 1.6 children per woman. That is an almost 25% drop in population over the course of one generation. This is while the construction industry continues to pump out housing. This is pretty much a commitment to continued mass immigration.

I think the only viable option here, which maybe is the needle Trump is trying to thread, is to stagnate housing prices while everything else inflates around them. A sudden drop in asset price is bad (underwater mortgages), but a slow loss in relative value --- in your example, house still $1M, but so is starting salary --- could at least be palatable to existing homeowners and approve relative affordability.

That could work, but with how sticky wages have been relative to inflation it's a risky move.

China wanted its bubble to pop because BYD's engineers can rent condos for far less per square meter than what GM engineers can.

China didn’t want its bubble to pop and the state took extreme action to (1) prevent the housing bubble from popping and (2) once it partially did, prevent on-paper values from collapsing to prevent extreme public anger. To illustrate, while data is scarce, since the bubble burst in 2022/3 Chinese house prices have fallen by about 2.5% per year. The worst affected cities maybe 5%.

By contrast, after the US housing bubble burst in 2007, property prices in the worst affected cities (like Phoenix) fell by over 50%.

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