> This actually makes 0 sense. Like, do you even understand what you're saying?

It makes perfect sense if the decision to work is based on real, after-tax income. Change the comment to say "the tax rate keeps climbing so I quit working" and it would not occur to anyone to challenge it.

Once you have enough saved to generate income covering the very basics (probably somewhere around $30k/year in a LCOL area in the US) it becomes a question of whether selling a 40-hour block of your time on a weekly basis is worth it. For this individual, it is not.

> Like, do you even understand what you're saying?

That comment is unnecessary and has the effect of making people feel bad.

I think the rationale is that wages are stagnant in comparison to investments (stocks) and costs (inflation). So there's decreased incentive to focus on wages as a form of income, and more incentive to focus on investments.

I've definitely felt this personally, as my income shifts towards investments, my will to work for a wage has decreased. That shift has increased because I've accured more investments, but also because investments have grown kind of ridiculously compared to my wage.

Would you rather spend your savings before or after they become worthless?

>The value of your savings is decreasing at a faster rate than ever before, so its a good time to stop saving and spend it?

Inflation does incentivize spending, yes. Would you rather have 100 kilos of rice today, or wait and have 99 kilos of rice tomorrow for the same price?

Stock market returns will tend to exceed inflation. Salary may not. It's quite possible for inflation to make your salary shrink in real terms, making it no longer worth working if you can afford to retire.

I don't think that OP meant to say their wage income was low.

I think OP means that once their investment returns starts exceeding their wage income, their motivation for continuing to work drops.

Which, I kinda get. If you don't really like what you're doing, it's harder to stay motivated at continuing to work when your bag of money makes more money than you do.

It sounds like OP is already planning on some amount of return to work, which may be necessary because that exact point (investment returns > wage income) isn't necessarily a safe point to retire. But it might be, depending on how much you spend, and what your not-employer-funded healthcare costs are.

Hacker news moment

I have the same feelings as the original poster as I get further into middle age and have a good retirement nest egg - for me there are things more valuable - free time and the things I want to do with it but can't get paid to do - than making more income than I really need.

I don't have a family, so it's manageable. If I had kids there is no way I could work part-time.

LCOL a good house might be 140k outright. Their costs are probably barely anything yearly against their returns.

The thing is at some point there is very little to gain. Once you have a nice place to live and don't need to sweat over daily expenses there isn't much that significantly improves life quality other than just having more time (that is working less) for yourself and your family.

Add high taxes to this and working is even less attractive when they take 50% from you. No wonder many highly qualified people decide to pass on that deal and just do the bare minimum which in OP case is nothing.

My salary has not kept up with inflation over the last 15 years. The industry I am in, which is not related to tech, has undergone massive consolidation leading to 2-3% raises some years and no raises other years.

Cumulative inflation since 2019 has been 30%. More with these new numbers, I think.

What jobs have the wages gone up 30% in that same time period? I’m sure a few, but not many.

In the tech industry? Absolutely they have not, and in fact have likely gone the other way.

Unless you're maybe one of the few specialists in deep learning, CUDA, etc.

There's been mass layoffs and downward pressure on compensation all over.

Also is having twice as much money (1x from interest and 1x from income) not a benefit?

Maybe you are the strawman consumer that skeptics point to in guaranteed basic income debates, who just stops working because they get a check.

Reminds me of stories from ex-Yu during high inflation periods (e.g. yearly doubling; not counting periods when there were runaway spikes of almost daily doubling) when people would go to remote areas where shops didn't yet get the updated prices from headquarters and basically walked away with a bunch of near free stuff.

You and your employer should consider future expected inflation at the time of negotiation. You don't need a true up in that case to "break even!.

Argentina, for example. Coworkers there told me about this. Madness.

>> If you're at $5,000/month, a 4.2% raise puts you at $5,210. If you're spending $600/month on gas (not unreasonable for someone that drives an SUV and lives in the suburbs instead of in the urban core), you still come out behind.

This is the problem with people treat CPI as some word from the heavens...it is not. CPI is a highly constructed figure which conveniently includes/excludes things and is really more a floor of what the inflation is. Anyone living in the real world knows experienced inflation is way higher.

Don’t forget the obvious ‘finger on the scale’ influence from the administration too.

They're not necessarily "cooked," (but they certainly can be). Inflation is genuinely hard to calculate since it's different for everyone, goods and services purchased drift over time, and as you mentioned, that exact good also changes over time. CPI (and others) are more useful in a MoM or YoY context. At 10 years, it's better viewed as best guess cost of typical living rather than an economic indicator comparing apples and oranges.

> housing

This is actually the hardest to get right because it's the largest, and 2/3 of Americans own homes, so part of their costs are fixed.

Tax brackets are also inflation-adjusted, so shouldn't that cancel out?

A conversation with your boss about a COLA raise really shouldn't include your own personal finances. "I just bought a house" is not a good reason for a raise; "prices in our area have increased" is a much better one

True, but how inflation affects each person is different. This isn't a good measure, but it is the best we have, and usually close enough to the truth.

What advantages does that have over taking your paycheck 100% in cash and investing in index funds?

I've known a few people who lost everything when the company went bankrupt. (most died of old age when I was a kid - before pension reform companies often did put your retirement in the company stocks)

If inflation due to energy costs is running hot they’ll have to raise rates which will cause stock prices to fall.

And you're still taxed on the "gain"

The solution is Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS). You do have to pay taxes on the inflation adjustment (OID income). As long as the interest (after taxes) is higher than taxes on inflation adjustment you're good.

How is it inaccurate? If I only care about buying apples, and apples get 10% more expensive, and my salary only increases by 5%, then I can't buy as many apples as I could have before. How many apples I do actually buy in the end is irrelevant to the calculation.

No, it's like, if you could buy 100 things before, but you can only buy 96 things now, then you have accumulated less value :D

I disagree. "Money" has many meanings, absolute and relative.

Receiving "market" compensation trumps real-world expenses, since the market for one's labor is a different market than the real-world expenses.

It's still a cut in purchasing power even if you aren't hurting.

But if you don't mind, I'll take 4.2% from your pay.

No. What isn't spent now is future spending. You are still getting less.

2% is good, anything over 3% is not good, anything over 4% is bad, 5% and higher is really bad. Hope that clears things up for you.

Inflation isnt as simple as good/bad. Monetary theory shows us that short term inflation is a good way to counteract spikes in unemployment. Whether you prefer stable inflation with swings in unemployment or stable unemployment with swings in inflation or something in between is a political question.

Indeed. Back then food and shelter comprised a much larger % of the average income, and so each percentage point of inflation was considerably more painful than it is now.

Zooming out tells you this tick up to 4.2% is not nearly as bad as the post-covid inflation, and drastically better than the 70s. Not a good sign, but also not too far outside the historical mean and probably no need to panic in and of itself.

Because inflation compounds

And yes I am oversimplifying: the current conditions are actually do to a number of stupid things the current administration did because they assumed everyone who came before them was stupid and woke, but this just strikes me wrong, as though the chart should be comfort to someone struggling to make rent or pay for medicine or what have you. Much of this could have been avoided.

The value of the currency relative to an evolving bag of reference goods.

Food is one of the things that's going to have the least change in value.

That doesn't strike me as a problem. It models what consumers actually do. The consumers are still being fed and they're suffering only a minor loss in their preference.

They don't keep any kind of hedonic measure, which might be interesting. If a consumer would rather have steak, but switches to chicken when it's over $10/pound, and then switches to tofu when chicken hits $10/pound, they're considerably less happy even if they're reasonably well fed.

You could probably use that to calculate some kind of hedonic metric: "I was originally willing to pay only $1/lb for tofu because it brought me 20% of the pleasure that a $5 steak would have." But you're not 80% less happy overall, since food is only part of your total happiness, so you'd need a "basket" of happiness.

The current administration fires people leading BLS when it reports numbers they don't like, regardless of the merit of the numbers.

It's more the messenger than the message. Or in this case the people funding and staffing the messenger, and who desperately need this number to be as low as possible.

It’s not this report specifically but the other stuff the admin has done with the BLS.

Not so much THIS report, but you can't trust any data that the Trump administration puts out after all the blantant corruption. Remember the Sharpie on the hurricane chart?

Because people can’t internalize regional variance. So since the beginning of time, it’s not noticed when the national number is higher and fraud when it’s lower.

Americans spend a significant portion of their income on food and fuel, which are excluded. Historically, these together accounted for about 15% of their income, probably up to 20% after recent price increases.

Because they basically pick and choose what's in there.

If you sat down and did the math on what it costs someone to pay rent / mortgage, car insurance, health insurance, daycare, schooling, going out to eat and drink, doing anything for entertainment, go to the grocery store.. it's not a debate that the real inflation is significantly higher all the time than what is used to measure the number.

At least raw milk is getting cheaper

>Per the link, food is up 3.1%

But if you look at the sibling comment, all of that came from "Food away from home ". In other words, it's all because of takeout/restaurants, not groceries. Those were actually dragging inflation down.

Energy going up drives evrything up, including food. Everything we do depends on energy in many different ways.

How much of the food cost (and everything else) is tied to the increase in diesel prices? Do they adjust that out?

Is this of any significance? I would imagine most people are like me: we shop based on quality and price and where we want something on that curve. Whether someone raises the price on me “because of inflation” or “because we want to make more money” is indistinguishable.

A rationale for the price rarely affects my choice. If I don’t want to buy something for a price, explaining that the guy won’t be able to survive without pricing it that high won’t get me to buy it. If I do want to buy something for a price, explaining that a guy is charging a hefty profit won’t get me to not buy it.

The only thing that will get me to buy it or not buy it is if it is at the point on the price/quality frontier where I want it.

A small number of companies control the meat supply in the United States. If you decide that you don't want to buy that $50 hot dog, you likely won't have many comparable options.

This cannot be emphasized enough. The rise in egg prices was such a thing. Avian flu was an impact, but not to the degree that egg prices increased. Those producers are reporting record profits.

You mean with the greatest wealth transfer to the wealthy in history that added a quarter to our entire national debt? Yeah, you can't do that often.

The US national debt is about to hit $40 trillion. It was $20 trillion 9 years ago.

What Trump and Biden should've done is implemented a windfall profits tax of probably 80%. But there's absolutely zero chance of that happening by either party.

Shipping container rates were starting to stabilize, but the issues with the Straight have caused a 80%+ increase in the last few months.

https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-...

'No real reason' is the 2026 version of 'they hate our freedom'.

The Iran war is for sure a huge part of that (just look at the energy cost inflation!), but other elements are a factor too. "Months ago" is really not that long when it comes to inflation.

It's not the administration doing the strategic thinking. The administration is entirely reactive and straightforward to manipulate -- if you have money.

The people with strategic goals just send money and compliments and the administration does what they want.

I mostly agree with you, but I do think they’re highly skilled at taking advantage of whatever messes they cause. “Chaos is a ladder” might as well be the theme of this decade.

I would not underestimate the figures in the background. Trump and Hegseth are clowns of course, but they don't make policies.

The energy dominance model was already floated by Trump in his first term. He was the most vocal critic of Nordstream long before the Ukraine war. Biden couldn't push so aggressively because of the green agenda but dutifully shut down Nordstream and made the EU dependent on US LNG.

Now with the oil barons in power, there are no green agenda limitations and the long term plan (which is 100% not from Trump himself) can accelerate.

Look how they already make the EU and Japan rearm with all these levers (they should rearm, but for the purposes of keeping waterways free from whomever blocks them ...).

The National Energy Dominance Council primarily cites national security interests:

https://www.eenews.net/articles/white-house-launches-energy-...

It works towards increasing US energy production at all costs even though the US is already a net exporter.

What is not mentioned of course is that increased US dependencies of countries like Japan are a feature:

https://energytracker.asia/japan-to-buy-record-amounts-of-ln...

That model, extort US investments and let Japan build US infrastructure in return for LNG was from 2025.

Now, with the Iran conflict, Qatar is shut off and Japan can be pressured even more.

Might be wishful thinking, but I see this as the silver lining of the conflict