As if I need to make another comment about a, or multiple bubbles, but something has to give and here it's of course the consumer. New and used car prices are at all-time highs (nominal it sounds like, but tell that to someone whose wages haven't kept pace (i.e., almost everyone)). Housing prices are at all-time highs (in terms of price:income so no qualifier needed there). Tariffs are not being 100% eaten by the producers (duh), nor by the importers (double duh), and so the consumer is being hit by those. Health care costs are about to rise materially as we flip to 2026 for large swaths (all?) of the US population. Any tax relief seen by the average consumer is likely not even close to enough to counterbalance all the increased prices/costs.
HN is fond of saying that the only thing propping up the US economy at this point is AI investment (not informed enough to know if that's actually true, but outside of equity prices it sure seems like everything else is blinking "this economy sucks.").
So when will the music stop? Seems like it should've been "yesterday," but what's the argument for it to continue playing for the foreseeable future? The great wealth transfer? AI efficiency/productivity gains (without the vast elimination of jobs)? Something else?
On paper, nothing will happen. The wealthy in America will continue to get wealthier. Real estate and stocks will soar in value.
In reality, the dollar's true value will plummet. The FED is starting to lower interest rates again. We are likely going to undergo brutal inflation.
Crashing the economy is obviously very politically unpopular. The left/right will do whatever they can to keep this charade up, even if it means dooming the working class and throwing them some kind of bone to make them think they're ok.
The COVID pandemic was a good example of this. The working class got thrown a $2,000 check while there was billions given to bail out businesses/lots of fraud. Not a lot of people cared because hey, we got a $2k check... Even though that $2k check was not even close to maintaining their relative wealth pre-pandemic due to all of the government's inflationary measures.
There won't be a recession, it won't happen on paper. But the middle/working class will continue to be squeezed. And there will be programs to "rescue us." Maybe it's low cost home programs, maybe it's community college, I'm not sure. But I am sure it will never truly benefit the working/middle class, it'll just be a token to keep them from fully dying.
The value of the dollar has already plummeted, 10% or so this year. It's expected that 2026 will have an equal dollar devaluation. This is the best-possible interpretation of the goals of this administration, the so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord that is somehow supposed to help some part of the economy. It's unclear who or how, to me.
The BRL or CNY is probably one of the most apt comparison given the BRICKS alliance. That's where you are seeing the roughly 10% swing since Jan. (if you go back to last Oct the swing is less pronounced. IDK exactly what was happening last Oct, but there appears to have been an upswing in dollar value from Oct to Jan and a steady decrease of the dollar value since.)
In October of last year, people were betting on Trumps election leading to tariffs leading to a stronger dollar. This trend continued post-election pre-inaguration. Since the tariffs did not materialize to the level expected, the dollar weakened to its levels prior to his election.
Your explanation makes no sense. First, nobody thought that Trump would actually go through with the tariffs because it's an insane plan and that wiser people in the administration would restrain Trump. So the dollar started to devalue when people realized that "holy shit these tariffs might actually happen." The tariffs are way way bigger than anybody expected.
The entire goal of the tariffs were to weaken the dollar:
> The Mar-a-Lago Accord is a proposed economic and trade initiative of the Donald Trump administration during his second term. Named after Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, the Accord is a blueprint for restructuring global trade and monetary relations. Its core goal is to devalue the dollar while preserving its role as the world reserve currency, a careful balancing act intended to avoid the contradictions described in the Triffin paradox.
> would actually go through with the tariffs because it's an insane plan and that wiser people in the administration would restrain Trump.
What is insane is to assume republicans picked by Trump will restrain Trump. The adults in the room theory was disproven long before that election.
Trump 1.0 had tarriffs. Trump talked abput tarrifs. People in fact assumed Trump will do tarriffs, they just slightly underestimated how bad the trade war will be.
> The EUR (if that is what you are going by) is unusually strong
By what standards? It’s slightly above the trend (i.e. continuous decline since 2008 with an occasional up and down here and the) but not that substantially
It's substantial for the eurozone economy, namely their exporters. The machinery sector in particular is under major pressure as a result of the stronger euro.
That operates on calendar year. That is primarily due to the rapid appreciation of the USD vs global based after Trumps election on the perception that tariffs would be far higher and more continuous than they actually were.
The truth is, the currency markets are roughly where they were about a year ago, with the exception of EUR, but thats a special case which I think is a symbol if a misstep by the ECB.
Yes, the calendar year matches what I was talking about, and more closely matches the current economic policy of the US. It wasn't until February that the real economic and foreign policy of the US became clear, and the full insanity of it all is still sinking in.
I'm not sure why your hand-picked list of currencies is revelant, or why your particular dates are relevant. The course for the future looks to be a greater devaluation of the US currency.
This is the goal of the Trump administration and what is apparent to analysts.
> I'm not sure why your hand-picked list of currencies is revelant, or why your particular dates are relevant. The course for the future looks to be a greater devaluation of the US currency.
What other currencies do you believe are important? We pulled 2-5 of the most commonly used reserve currencies and some other ones as well.
The EUR is unusually strong, in part due to fiscal tightness by ECB (see their balance sheet L2 Liabilities here https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/annual-reports-financial-sta...) compared to the US. This is having a knock-on effect that the EUR strengthens against the dollar, which actually causes a whole host of problems for an export economy.
It's why you see Lagarde calling for a reserve EUR; it's the only way to export EUR at this point. But that's a topic for another time.
I don't see any evidence that EUR is particularly strong against USD. Except maybe if you take a very short-term perspective. There is always some volatility in exchange rates, and export businesses that cannot tolerate 10% swings in either direction are not viable in the first place.
> I don't see any evidence that EUR is particularly strong against USD. Except maybe if you take a very short-term perspective.
Yes; this is a short term perspective. Europe is functionally an export market and these currency fluctuations hurt badly. For example, Mercedes-Benz had a consolidated profit margin in '22 of around 9%. These swings do either force loss of jobs (bad) or require a devaluation of the currency.4
Europe was also an export market in the past. Back in early 2002, 1 EUR was worth less than 0.9 USD. Then it started climbing rapidly and reached a peak of 1.6 USD in mid-2008.
The value of money is inherently unpredictable. The exchange rate between EUR and USD has never been stable longer than about 1.5 years. Something unexpected always happens, and then the rate goes up or down by 10% or even more. You either tolerate that or try protecting yourself with various financial instruments.
Exactly what people are saying here (the USD is weakening at an alarming pace! Americans are going Weimar Republic!) isn't borne out in the data. We aren't seeing the USD weaken against other countries in an independent manner. That's the point; not to prove that we are seeing a stalwart dollar, but that we are seeing roughly "business as usual".
Sure, but I think we are seeing the US's future more in France at the moment than a secular decline against all other developed nations. There are very real questions about how society is structured that need to be resolved, but the US is far from alone or the worst in that regard.
>The COVID pandemic was a good example of this. The working class got thrown a $2,000 check while there was billions given to bail out businesses/lots of fraud.
A lot of people were paid more to not work during COVID restrictions than they earned before or after. $653 billion in federal funds for unemployment programs.
People were getting $600 per week from the feds for a while, then $300/week. Not a single $2000 check, $2400 per month. About the bottom 25 percentile were brought up to 25th percentile income.
>Crashing the economy is obviously very politically unpopular.
But not something one worries or cares about if one doesn't worry about having to be elected and/or is willing to use the military to suppress dissent...
So tanking the economy is a way to keep and maintain power...
If manufacturing is to return to the USA, it will be as fully automated as technically possible. So forget about jobs, there won't remotely be as many as needed to "reboot the working class"
The effect of weakening the dollar is not to return manufacturing jobs to the US while allowing the same dollars to buy the same products. It's to make imported goods more expensive so domestically produced ones win out in the marketplace, both in and outside of the US. To make you switch because your favorite products become too expensive.
It's to make you chose Californian wine over French one, so to speak. Whether you are in the US or elsewhere.
If technological advancement is going to kill the working class, this might slightly accelerate that development but it does not change it one way or the other.
I still don’t understand the point of all this exercise. In the long run, without a fairer redistribution of wealth within US society (which isn’t going to happen with these polices and the politicians pushing them) forcing re-shoring will still result in higher prices overall: expensive Made in USA products, and expensive imports due to a weak dollar. So why?
> In reality, the dollar's true value will plummet.
It already has. It's down ~12% vs the EUR. It's even down 4% vs CAD, and Canada's on the front line of having its economy destroyed by Trumponomics. When the global markets have more confidence in the Canadian dollar than the American one, good luck...
It's probably much higher than that in reality if you look at assets spiking compared to the dollar. Gold is going completely parabolic right now. Real estate shows no signs of slowing down. Crypto (regardless of your opinion of it) is spiking as people try to store value anywhere besides the dollar. We hear about the AI bubble propping up equity markets all the time but I always wonder how much of it is just investors desperately converting dollars into anything else with a bit of liquidity.
We've got an insane bubble right now. Quantum computing stocks are valued at $50b market cap with 0 revenue and no substantial finished products. Just research.
Remember when "unicorn" companies were a big deal. Billion was significant amount of valuation and money. Lately it really feels like billion is pretty much nothing anymore. There has been inflation, but not that much to really make billion to be small sum.
The high end seems to be wildly out of control. We have $trillion+ companies now, and we are likely to see the world's first individual USD trillionaire within the next 12 months.
Hey now, you can't say they don't have any product. We got a machine which can factor number 15 now. (with a preparation time for this calculation of only a few month) Isn't that amazing? We will be breaking RSA2048 any day now. Let's invest a few hundred billions into changing encryption everywhere! /s
>So when will the music stop? Seems like it should've been "yesterday," but what's the argument for it to continue playing for the foreseeable future? The great wealth transfer? AI efficiency/productivity gains (without the vast elimination of jobs)? Something else?
They seem to have figured out that you can just simply stop caring about the needs of 90% of your population if you systematically withhold any wealth from them and concentrate it to the 10%. The plan it seems is that the economy will increasingly be driven entirely by the upper middle class and above (who are all doing better now than they ever have in history), while the rest of us are left to rot and serve their drinks and clean their homes. The future for the average North American is starting to look a lot like our southern counterparts, where the wealthy elites in the cities rule over an underclass of destitute poverty everywhere else.
Historically, it did not. What actually does lead to revolution is regime becoming weak and unable to organize. You can keep people in horrible conditions and there will be no revolution, because dissenters will get stopped long before they anywhere near organizing themselves.
It is when the powerful become the weak that revolution can happen. And it takes more then one round of it till reasonable government emerges again.
>Historically, this has ultimately led to revolutions.
Which is why they've spent the last 50 years pitting the lower classes against themselves with meaningless culture wars. In a world with F-16s, Apache helicopters, and panopticon digital surveillance, there will never be armed revolution again (nor would anyone actually want that); the only option is nonviolent resistance. But it'll never happen in the US since we have zero class solidarity, and are all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Haha, funnily enough they said the same thing before 1918. They also said a bunch of Vietnamese farmers could never beat a world class military. Have faith in your fellow workers and hold on to the hope that a better world is possible.
As someone who knows people who fought that war on the other side, the vast majority were professionally trained soldiers, not Huy the illiterate rice paddy farmer who took an AK-47 and took pot shots at Americans.
There's a reason much of the older generation of Viet military and political leadership studied in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, BSSR, and RSFSR and why both the Vietnamese Army and the MPS still send their officers and leadership track personnel to train in Belarus and Russia to this day.
Heck, Russian is still an fairly popular language choice for Viet students targeting civil service or police careers.
Furthermore, a ragtag army of farmers would not have been able to fight against the PLA in 1979 or overthrow the PRC's lackeys and backed by the US in Cambodia and Laos in the 1980s-1990s.
It's also why you find so many Vietnamese in Prague, Warsaw, East Germany, Minsk, and Moscow to this day.
The fiction of "illiterate paddy farmers pushed American soldiers out" is just a salve around the reality that the US abandoned South Vietnam in order to seal the US-China deal in the early 70s that helped contain the USSR in the late 20th century.
Sure, but this time it's not different. The play has always and forever will be to try and force most of the population into a peasant caste be removing education and welfare, as well as setting up nice circular infighting.
It will inevitably end up as it always does. Or we'll all die horribly. You know, either way.
Who is trying to remove education and welfare and how are they accomplishing it? I have high doubts people actually want those things removed, especially in a country as great as the US.
As the Palestinian resistance has shown, the vietnamese, the cubans, etc it is very difficult to defeat a population that doesn't want to give in even if you have fancy toys and a huge kill ratio.
The Vietnamese and Cubans were funded by the Soviets trying to expand their empire. They were proxy war fighters for a nuclear power. Sure they were kind of rag tag but only because the Soviets considered all soldiers to be disposable.
The out of work tradesman going into the Fairfax VA or Berkley CA Whole Foods (IDK if either of these places have Whole Foods, but they seem like they could) in the year 2030 and dusting the avocados with anthrax won't care whether the anthrax is funded by China or Russia, just that it winds up in the lungs of the people who've run his country into the ground.
While I think terrorists should care who is using them and why, that wasn't my point.
My point was that the parent comment's examples weren't of a difficult to defeat determined population. They were warlords helping imperialists establish nuclear bases so the Soviets could project power. Everything else is just a fairy tale.
They tell all sorts of fairy tales to get soldiers to march into certain death and have throughout history.
My understanding is that historically, popular uprisings only succeed when part of the established power allows it to happen or tags along for their own reasons. This includes the military.
I would be happy to be pointed at some exception to this.
I think as people get further squeezed there is only one way to go and that is mass strikes. It’s likely things have to get worse before people are forced into the only realistic option.
The economy is a lie. There is no the singular, hive mind economy. There are several segments and it's growing ever lopsided and moving K-shaped. The so-called "precariat" are hurting very badly. It doesn't matter what sort of imaginary, incestuous valuations NVIDIA et. al. attain because it doesn't trickle down in any measurable fashion. There is an pervasive profit-price spiral of necessities is a huge contributor of ongoing and deepening inflation. And the random tariffs / punitive federal sales taxes are yet another inflationary policy. The ultra rich can and will deny technological un(der)employment is happening until the pitchforks come out, and then blame the poor for being lazy/stupid/slow/unfortunate/antifa/whatever.
we learned our lessons from 2008 and 2020. my random thoughts
1) money has nowhere else go for now
2) great wealth transfer = really doesn't matter as long as the super rich can keep inflating their wealth faster than us peons. if you are above that curve just stay ahead of it at all costs.
3) prolonged pain can be extended indefinitely for most people by keeping them perpetual renters / extending loan terms.
4) all else fails print more money and i guess when it all does collapse doesn't matter, retreat to X country or bunker (lol)
I think to be above the curve requires being the first to receive the freshly printed money to buy more assets before they inflate further. You need to be first to benefit... So grift off the government contracts that lead/cause more printing.
> New and used car prices are at all-time highs (nominal it sounds like
Well, yes, nominal. But no, not really. Cars (and really this isn't surprising) have been getting steadily more affordable over time. They represent about half the fraction of consumer income that they did in the 80's. AS ALWAYS, please just go to FRED to ask these questions before announcing incorrect answers on the internet. New car price[1] expressed as a fraction of median income:
It's an extremely inconvenient situation that Americans find themselves in, a sort of self-perpetuating cycle of car dependency that they reinforce because alternatives require far too much investment to make worthwhile.
I'm really glad that I can live in a city without having to own a car if I don't want to. It makes a significant difference to my monthly expenses. And, honestly, it's a lot nicer and feels a lot more free in many ways. Places are more accessible not less.
I can't imagine being on the bottom rung of society and having yet another awkward expense, especially because you become unreliable if you don't properly invest in the maintenance of the thing. Which might cause you to lose your income altogether.
It sucks that you need to own a car to get anywhere in most of the US. When my wife and I moved to Southern California from Chicago, we had a single car and tried to make that work for a while, but it was just not doable. We have a grocery store 2 miles away, but any other services are further than walking distance (and even the grocery store requires walking on the shoulder of a busy arterial road at a couple points. I used to bike everywhere in Chicago, but doing so here is too risky).
That said, the problems of car loans are far beyond that - From the article: " The average monthly repayment now stands at more than $750.". That's nuts! I make a solid upper middle-class income, and I can't imagine spending that much on car financing, regardless of the loan length. When we needed a second car, we bought a 6-year-old Volvo station wagon in good condition, it it's still serving us well. Many of my neighbors, who make about half what I do, think we're poor because of it.
Exactly. This is going to come off as incredibly privileged, but I'm not a huge fan of car loans. In fact, I'm not a huge fan of leveraging to afford any asset unless it's appreciating in value or generating income. I buy and drive old, nearly junker cars because I can't afford a $40K new car. I can "afford" the monthly payments on a $40K car, but it's just a terrible financial idea. Totally nutty. A $750 monthly payment (I don't even want to know the term) for something that is losing value every day is absolutely bonkers.
The amount of debt Americans routinely and causally take on is honestly ridiculous.
The standard recommendation of taking out sent so you can invest your money and "make it work for you" frustrates me to no end.
Yes, on paper I can accrue more wealth if I mortgage my house and invest that same amount elsewhere. No, I would not trade owning a house outright for having a house that will be taken from me if I can no longer pay, strict insurance requirements, and a pile of someone else's debt that I call money and ignore the risk implied in investing in someone else's gamble.
I don't think gp comment is advocating doing a cash out re-finance, but to exploit leverage when first financing the purchase.
I used to be very debt averse. Owing a six figure sum seemed like a huge burden. Now I understand that mortgagees are non-callable. If you put 20% down that removes a lot of risk of being underwater. Fannie Mae is eating inflation risk for you. It's a way of smoothing expenses over multiple life stages. With a 30 year mortgage you can get a smaller payment when you're younger, earning less, and paying for daycare. When you're older you're earning more, might be an empty nester, and inflation has made each payment easier. By not rushing to pay off low interest debt you've effectively transferred money from 50 year old you to 30 year old you.
If you stayed employed, locked in a 3% mortgage, and contributed to your 401k, you won the wealth re-distribution game of 2020-2022.
Respectfully, you're effectively describing the argument I take issue with.
> Now I understand that mortgagees are non-callable.
How are you defining non-callable? If you stop paying on your mortgage that sent will eventually be called and you will be kicked out.
> If you put 20% down that removes a lot of risk of being underwater
That removes the risk of being underwater for any market correction sub-20%. Real estate prices in any areas have grown more than that ovwr the last few years, the risk of a 20%+ correction is on the table.
> With a 30 year mortgage you can get a smaller payment
And a 40 year loan would be even smaller. Where do we draw the line, and why? 30 year loans weren't always the norm, you don't have to go too far back to find an average mortgage on 10 or 15 year loans.
> When you're older you're earning more, might be an empty nester, and inflation has made each payment easier.
Income doesn't always move up, and inflation only makes payment easier if you (a) secured a fixed rate loan and (b) stay in the same home long term.
> By not rushing to pay off low interest debt you've effectively transferred money from 50 year old you to 30 year old you.
Or if it doesn't work out, 30 year old you has a home at the expense of 35 year old you.
> If you stayed employed
That's a big if, and you not only need to stay employed, you need wages to at least keep up with true inflation. Your 401k won't matter until you are at an age where you can withdraw, or we have another pandemic-style response where we allow people to cash in 401ks without the early withdrawal fees.
I agree - I think it’s bad advice. And cars make even less sense than houses, which should hopefully appreciate in the long run. People think of car loans like “free money” if I can buy a car on credit and pocket the spread between my investments and my APR.
The problem is:
1) that encourages you to buy more car (and lose more money in depreciation and fees) than you would if you just paid cash for a cheaper car
2) there’s no guarantee you can beat your APR in the short run (to beat your APR you almost always have to move out on the risk frontier… T bills are not doing it)
I view it as: if capturing that marginal spread of whatever% is important to you, you are spending too much money and you’re probably taking your eye off a bigger loss you’re taking by spending all that.
It’s not ridiculous, it’s how the whole system works. People need to live their lives, and if they only way they can get around (or throw a birthday party, or have a funeral, or some other human thing) is to borrow money, they borrow money. Which in turn props up a huge proportion of the businesses that make up the economy.
The problem with old junkers is that if you don’t have the money in cash, how do you fix a major car repair? You can get a loan for a new car with money.
The car “generates income” because it allows you to get to work and hopefully make more than your car note.
Old car repairs generally don't cost as much as you'd expect, especially when you aren't paying $750/no on a loan plus higher insurance premiums.
My mechanics often perk up when I bring in my 80s era pickup. It has very low miles, they can generally diagnose it with very basic tools, and parts are cheap. When I have the time to work on it myself I appreciate it for those exact same reasons.
Yea, that $750/mo that you're now not paying can be saved to pay for the occasional repair bill that you're going to face while owning a junker car you didn't take on a loan for. Or, not, if you bought a 1995 Toyota Camry or something which is probably going to outlive you.
You mean "rod the block next week because it was used as an uber and before that it was owned by three successive hipsters who didn't change the oil because 'lol it's a Toyota' or whatever"
Dollar for dollar Toyotas were a bad buy as soon as Reddit started trying to tell everyone to buy them.
Right. I buy old cars, but I'm picky as hell and buy ones that have been taken care of, still have parts availability, and are models with proven reliability.
I still recommend anyone buy a later model Buick Lesabre if you find one in good shape. They're very cheap, the 3800 motor is excellent, and are still very comfortable rides that get around 30mpg on the highway.
3800 is in a lot of things. Chevy impala, Monte Carlo, etc. lots of cars benefit from that reliable and easy to maintain engine. Also gets decent gas mileage (not earth shattering but mid-high 20s is friendly to most bank accounts).
Yeah I'll keep an eye out for all of them when I'm in the market. I generally find the best results with the Buicks though, its more common to find one in good shape with a good service history.
The one I drive now was a one owner, it was literally a little old lady's Sunday church car that she sold because she decided to give up her keys. Its not perfect, and the AC compressor needed to be replaced, but they were the kind of owners that took it in ever 3k miles to a mechanic they trusted and fixed whatever the shop recommended.
My first car was a Katrina-damaged Impala that smelled like puke until I hit it with an ozone generator. Drove it for almost 6 years including twice cross country. Most I ever put into it was a new water pump.
And when you buy the car hypothetically and the motor goes out or the transmission within three months?
And it’s one thing if your car breaks down on a side street, it’s completely different if it breaks down on an interstate. If you have a daughter would you be comfortable with her driving an unreliable car? Your wife? Your mother?
Sure, your motor or trans can go out on any vehicle and unless you still have a warranty its your problem.
It sucks if you spend $3500 on a car only to spend another $2000 because the transmission went out and the timing was bad luck. I wouldn't recommend anyone buy an old car I'd they have no emergency fund left after the purchase though.
My wife does regularly drive our old cars. If it dies on the highway we'll deal with it. I don't have a daughter, but I wouldn't worry about my kid driving the kind of old cars I pick up - I'm patients picky, and able to work on them myself. The car would be the least of my worries if I had a young daughter with a drivers license.
You can also take out a loan from a credit union for the repair bill on your older car. Or even putting it on a credit card is an option.
A $3k repair loan is a lot easier to pay off than a $30k new car loan.
A lot of the people I know try to justify “new car fever” and will use some version of “I don’t feel safe in it anymore” or “I don’t think I can trust it.”
It’s a lot easier to get a secured loan for a car than an unsecured loan depending on your credit.
I’ve only had new car fever once. When I was 25 and bought my second car - a Mustang in 1999. I drove my Mercury Tracer that my parents bought me in 1991 as a junior in high school.
But that car was wrecked in 2008. I gave my next car - a Honda Civic - to my step son in 2014 and my next car after that - a 2012 Chevy Sonic bought slightly used from CarMax in 2020 when I started working remotely and we went down to one car.
But I would still much rather by a cheap newish car that I don’t have to worry about than a beater that might put me down or more importantly my wife.
This country is insanely ego and pride focused or fixated.
Capitalism exploits this in advertising.
Americans throw money at everything and then wonder why they're broke.
Or in the case of cars, people finance a new car and throw money at repairs instead of doing what folks like you and I do. Buy a reliable older car that's cheap to work on. But that takes "learning" and most Americans are convinced that learning is a waste of time, just throw money at the problem.
A common advertising technique is to exploit peoples' problems. Buy Product(tm) and your problem(s) will be solved! Sometimes this problem doesn't even exist but the advertiser will exploit your fear. If you don't buy Product(tm) for your family you don't love them/are putting them in danger/you are not a real man!
Our solution to this was two cars, with one being a tiny well used EV (2015 Fiat 500E) where the range boils down to "dont leave town". Its a fantastic city car. 50% to full is about 3 hour on a 120v wall charger, and that's enough juice to run around our town for a ~week for all kinds of errands.
The other car is a 2023 Leaf with the extended range trim, which is sufficient to get us all around the PNW, although I would hesitate to take it east of the Cacades.
It doesn’t take that much to for huge numbers of people to be able to transfer to car free existence. Zoning laws inside cities do a amazing amount to force cars on millions of Americans.
Car free access to existing transit hubs like metro stations is often horrible and not particularly expensive to improve.
Cities could create bus and bike lanes literally overnight. Load up a truck with concrete parking curbs and cones and drop them. No one is going to bike until the infrastructure makes it safe and convenient. Like safe enough to let a kid or 65 year old woman bike.
We just choose to continue subsidizing a triangle of car dependency. The government finances toll-free roads, mandates parking minimums, and enforces restrictive zoning. Businesses and real estate consumers pick up the tab on the real cost of free parking (higher rents and mortgages, parking garage construction costs). Drivers pour money into car loans, insurance, maintenance, and fuel.
I'm glad you have that opportunity too, but purely on the financials it's probably not so much of a win when you consider the heightened cost of everything (housing in particular) in a city, right?
Cities are artificially expensive becuase we ban them in nearly every location in the US, and ban new housing in cities.
It would have been an easy fix 10+ years ago, but as the housing crisis got worse and the working class was priced out, building got a lot more expensive and we have a huge labor crisis in addition to the regulatory crisis.
All solvable, but the political establishment and the political power base (homeowners and landlords) are dead set against solving it.
Depends when you got into it. If you're an older gen, you got into that city early and are likely unburdened by high dwelling costs - instead, you've got a windfall of appreciation ahead of you.
Reality is, outside of housing, city life is generally cheaper because it's much more accessible and the tax base is better suited to covering those expenses. So, older generations get the best of all worlds, per usual.
Pull up the age demographics for any major city. The older demographics largely got into housing at more affordable times and are less sensitive to rent and mortgage prices increasing. Housing costs is a cost that OVERWHELMINGLY impacts younger demographics.
I live in Malmö which is across the bridge from Copenhagen.
It's not comparable to the US in terms of Salary, but if I compare to the same size City in the UK (Coventry), it's not more expensive to live here than there. Coventry has a decent amount of car dependency for its size.
If we're comparing to a US City, I guess Orlando is pretty close (Orlando has a lower population than Malmö), but home prices are higher. However, there are only larger houses available making the comparison a bit squiff.
You don’t have to be in a large or even a medium sized city for car dependency to be alleviated. There’s a not just bikes video about this exact thing.
Housing and transportation should be considered a single budget category. If you can get rid of a second car but pay $500/mo more in rent it could be a wash.
This is an extremely privileged viewpoint. Even in Tokyo, people in the bottom half of the income distribution do not live close enough to popular transit lines to be as mobile as someone with a beater car in Dallas. They spend a lot more time commuting (and they can’t “just do some work on the train” because they have real jobs). Even in Tokyo, their commutes are crowded, they’re subject to the weather.
Being tied to transit lines—again, because even in Tokyo transit isn’t as convenient as point-to-point car travel—limits where people can look for jobs. That makes it a poverty trap because people can’t easily find jobs in different areas. And it makes having a family and kids much more logistically complicated. The most transit-dependent cities have abysmal birth rates.
It's only privileged because I'm living in a city that has actively prioritised other modes of transport.
I invite you to compare Orlando and Malmo.
If you have the opportunity to visit both, I would recommend it. They have the same population size (actually, Malmo has more people in it, but, close enough) yet in one it's impossible to get across the street without a car, even to go to the grocery store, and the other has entire portions of the city where cars aren't even able to go. -- Yet everyone manages to get around, and most people would consider it very convenient to do so.
Why are you comparing the cities based on whether you can get around “without a car?” In America, even the vast majority of the poorest people have a car. 96% of occupied housing units in Osceola County (where Orlando sits) have a car. American cities are optimized for that.
It’s almost certainly more convenient to get around Orlando by driving (as long as you aren’t going to Disney) than taking transit in Malmo. There is no city in the world where transit is more convenient and flexible than driving. I visit Tokyo once or twice a year, and even in Tokyo it’s usually more convenient to take an Uber than to take the train. And you’re not going to do better than Tokyo in terms of transit.
You can see this in the statistics. The average commute time of someone in the greater Tokyo area is 1 hour and 40 minutes round trip, or about 50 minutes one way: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu.... The average commute time for someone in Dallas County is under 30 minutes one way: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113. And the American commute is by yourself in a climate controlled car, instead of a crowded (even if clean and punctual) train.
The reason I’m talking about my city in particular is because everybody (even the poorest) can get around without a car and I’m not talking about just public transport.
It’s very liberating, even for children to be able to get around if not everything requires the use of a car.
I am aware that Orlando has optimised itself in a certain way, which makes it impossible to be any other way. That means being mildly convenient requires a complete overhaul of the whole system just for a small select group of people which is obviously unfavourable.
One of the major benefits of not being car dependent in particular is that there are more options not just public transport, you can get around by car- but there is also cycling, E-scooters, walking is more convenient, and of course there are buses trains and taxis. There’s even a bike rental scheme which covers the entire city and is so cheap as to be effectively free ($20 per year). With that in mind I find the argumentation that poor people have a worse time to be disingenuous- owning a car is the second largest expense most people have.
Malmo by the way is one of the poorest cities of the large cities in Sweden. I don’t know what the GDP per capita is compared to Orlando, but I’m not going to think that it’s much different to be perfectly honest with you.
Are you saying that it’s faster to get around Malmo on transit than in a car? I can see that being true for some route, but it’s unlikely unless you’re wealthy enough to live and work very close to transit stations.
When I lived in New York I did have a commute where transit was faster than driving. But it was like Mad Men—I went from my fancy high rise right next to the train station to my fancy law firm right next to another train station. That was a lovely commute, even compared to driving in the suburbs. But most people in New York (or Tokyo) cannot afford to live so close to popular transit lines.
> With that in mind I find the argumentation that poor people have a worse time to be disingenuous- owning a car is the second largest expense most people have.
That’s what we call “penny wise and pound foolish.” Cars is capital equipment, and get handed down through families. Like any capital equipment, they depreciate and require maintenance. But they also enable people to earn money. I have relatively poor in laws: my wife’s grandmother raised four kids as a waitress, and her husband did hunting and odd jobs. Cars, which they carefully pass down through families, enable them to move around for better jobs and housing. When my father in law lost his job, he moved in with his mom and found various jobs in a 60 mile radius. If you look at the places in the U.S. with good transit, the poor there are structurally poor. They can’t just go to where the jobs are—they are stuck going to where the train lines go. It becomes a trap that creates generational poverty.
If I need to work to earn a living and working remotely in Europe for an American company were not an option (for some strange reason) I'd rather live in Orlando.
I admit that Europe tends to be a nicer place to live for those who have enough savings that they do not need to work and for those too sick to work.
I don't speak Swedish and I'm perfectly fine living and working here. The level of English speaking in Malmö often exceeds the ability to speak English in places in the UK. Ironically.
I'm curious whether you work remotely for a non-European organization or are self-employed at the kind of job that can be done anywhere with decent internet connectivity.
I used to work here: https://www.massive.se - Owned by Ubisoft, kinda international, 800 or so employees in Malmö
Then I worked here: https://www.sharkmob.com - Now owned by Tencent, not very international though, not really spidered into Tencent. About 350~ employees in Malmö.
After that I worked here: https://www.rennsport.gg - German company, where it was a remote company but I build an onsite office or 20 persons in Malmö. That was the largest office in the company.
Now I work for a Swedish company.
There's also a bunch of companies like ESS (European Spallation Source)[0] in Lund, Verisure and Axis communications.
>I don't speak Swedish and I'm perfectly fine living and working here. The level of English speaking in Malmö often exceeds the ability to speak English in places in the UK.
That is interesting. I should explain that I edited out the part of my comment about language (because it is not relevant to my point).
I haven't been to Malmo, but I doubt that visiting a place for a short time tells a person much about what it is like to live and work there. I've read hundreds of comments from people who have lived and worked in both the US and Europe. I believe that life in Europe tends to be more orderly and pleasant than life in the US. A good example of "more orderly" is that deaths from automobile accidents are several times higher in the US than they are in most places in Europe -- and not just because Americans spend more time in cars: in the US, deaths per mile of travel in automobiles are several times higher.
>Why would you rather live in Orlando?
Because income is a massive factor in quality of life, and for any level of income, it is significantly easier to earn that level of income in the US than in Europe provided that the person in question is healthy enough to hold a job.
Limited mobility from public transit is a much bigger poverty trap. In Oregon, where my in laws are, you can get tons of odd jobs to scrape by within a 60-minute driving radius. Even in a place with great transit, like Tokyo, you’re pretty limited to where you can go on transit in 60 minutes.
That beater car in Dallas is also a financial millstone around its owners neck, and odds are, he's already living hand to mouth, and has zero redundancy for it.
If that weren't so often the case, people wouldn't lose their shit whenever gas goes up 50 cents/gallon.
Isn't America literally the country with longest average and median commutes to work? Like, that was always an American thing - the long commute.
Also, you cant do work in car either. You have to drive and actually pay attention. You cant (or should not) just listen to podcast or loosing yourself in the music. You dont get health benefits of walking a bit or of popping int the store on the way to buy food quickly.
My point here is that if public transport and city are semi reasonably organized, the car has to be actually seriously faster to be worth it.
From my understanding this seems to include all forms of transportation (which has value on its own I guess), but it would be more interesting to see car only.
Driving is much more comfortable than taking transit. You’re by yourself and you always have a seat. Anywhere that has transit good enough where it’s frequent and reliable is also a place where you’re probably standing during your commute.
For lots of America alternatives don't take that much investment. Creating a safe bike network would be relatively cheap and is feasible in large swaths of suburbs.
Due to the aforementioned car dependence: points of interest are further apart from each other than in other cities with solid cycling infrastructure (in Europe for example).
Enormous car-lots several times larger than the buildings that they serve for example, sprawling 6-lane roads that take 20s to clear a junction on a slow moving bicycle, these things contribute to it being infeasible for more poeple.
Connecting the bike lanes is not a problem, though people will fight it tooth and nail because they wan't all infrastructure spending to go to cars... hence, reinforcing the issue, because when all you have is a hammer...
Yes, they are further apart than they need to be, but they still tend to be within relatively short cycling distance. At certain times cycling is even faster than driving due to gridlock traffic, even in suburbs. For example, this very moment, because the main way through town is clogged with parents picking their kids up from school.
I think a majority of the problem is cultural and/or political. I know people who take a longer drive over a shorter bike ride (due to gridlock traffic).
Bikes can reach remarkably far in flat areas if the infrastructure is there. And with a folding bike you only need 1 bus as a range extender to go really far. However lots of money is relying on both those things not happening.
It’s honestly becoming a national subculture. Being a “burnout”. In tech burnout means you’re exhausted on working on things. In America “a burnout” is someone so deeply in debt they don’t even try to really pay it off, they just ignore the debt and spend money on cheap thrills when they can. Obviously not something that you advertise about yourself, but go to any bar in rural south and they know what am talking about.
As bad as the debt situation is in the US there’s not much a collection agency can do to force you to pay relatively petty sums under 100,000 they will just harass you basically.
The Roman proverb goes “The begger laughs in the face of the bandit” so burnouts spread money before it can be taken from them, then turn around and beg for more. A person who’s established this mentality, the exact amount they owe is the least of there problems.
> if you don't properly invest in the maintenance of the thing
For me, it's not the money that's annoying (though of course I'm not pleased by the bills every once in a while). It's the amount of time it takes to keep a car maintained! Seems like just yesterday I took a whole day remote to sit at the mechanics shop for a tire change, but now I have to do the same for an oil change! For this precise reason I end up doing a lot of maintenance late.
Or just do it yourself. At least oil changes can be done entirely oneself with a very small number of non-specialized tools. You don't even need a house with a garage, you can do it in your driveway or even on the street if you only have street parking.
As others have pointed out, tires are somewhat more complicated, but not entirely out of the realm of the home shade tree mechanic, if you're willing to invest in a few specialized tools/fixtures.
Unfortunately, there are some apartment complexes, HOAs, and city ordinances that prohibit people from working on their cars, which means either needing to find a legal place to do your own repairs or paying a mechanic. I’ve lived in apartments my entire adult life thus far, and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds. I have no choice but to either find a friend with a garage (not easy in the Bay Area when most of my friends can’t afford garages) or taking my car to a mechanic and paying Bay Area labor costs.
Those rules are usually intended to prevent people from having a derelict car up on blocks "under repairs" for weeks or months at a time. No one will notice or care if you do a quick oil change.
You know you can just break the rules when it comes to petty stuff like that, right? If you're not being unreasonable or thumbing your nose at them they typically don't come after you.
>and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds.
This is a direct result of the clean water act and knock on laws.
The clean water act mandates stormwater management. The solution needs to be maintained in perpetuity. The HOA is the entity saddled with this. There's various engineering calculations that go into pollutant load which impacts the size of the stormwater bullshit engineered ponds you need. In order to make the solution they are forced to build cheaper, the developer puts "no wrenching" (and a bunch of other things) in the initial HOA covenant.
The city ordinances are mostly the same. They're putting that shit in their so that the engineering numbers are better and their stormwater stuff can be cheaper.
That's not to say the snooty jerks don't like those rules for their own sake.
Locally to me, it’s pretty uncommon for any mechanics, tire shops, etc. to give any sort of timeline for any sort of service.
I recently had a 1-hour job done on my car - the only appointment my local mechanic takes is for a specific date - you drop off first thing in the morning, and they call you when they’re done.
I also just called my local tire shop to enquire about mounting/balancing (but not installing) tires - they don’t take appointments for that, but also don’t guarantee any particular speed of service - you drop off your tires, and they call you when they’re done, whether it’s that day or the next.
It's not that it takes all day to do the work. It's that you get to your "appointment" and they really haven't set aside any time for you. You're just put in line like the next walk up guy.
I keep seeing this argument but I think about whats broken in my ice over the years: brakes, control arms, struts, suspension springs. You get a pass on gearbox but as a genuine question, do these usual mechanical problems that have nothing to do with the engine jist not happen on EVs?
Bushings and suspension parts will likely have similar (or possibly worse) wear than an IC based car due to the extra weight.
Brakes a bit less possibly since you can use the regenerative braking but this also depends largely on the driver and situation.
*This is an assumption based on my experience with cars in general and doing my own repairs/maintenance not a slam on EVs.
My Model Y had to have its front control arms replaced after 4 years, it was squeaking really loud when turning. That's the only part that needed to be fixed so far, and at $250 it didn't exactly break the bank. There's the other stuff like wiper replacement and rotating/replacing tires which still have to be done. Much better than the regular $500+ annual maintenance with occasional $1000+ repair that my Honda Civic required. And that was a relatively cheap ICE to maintain.
If you look at an evs maintenance schedule it’s basically inspect stuff from time to time until 150k+ miles. Brakes don’t get changed as you almost never use them. Parts might break but not really anything maintenance wise.
First you have to get big bulky tires delivered to wherever you're going to install them on to your wheel rims. Then you need equipment to remove the old tires from your rims, and install the new ones on the rims. Next you need to balance the tires, then you need to take care of all the TPMS components. After this you need to mount your tires. Forget something? Too bad your car is out of commission til all the above is done.
When I last priced the equipment it wasn't that bad costwise. In my case though it was only worth it to get rid of the whole "dealing with tire shops" issue. A close friend owns a used car dealership and they bought the mounter and balancer. IIRC...it just needed a 240v line.
I have also lost days waiting for tire shops and alignment...as those are the only 2 things I don't do myself.
A tire machine is life changing in a good way if you have a lot of cars you're responsible for. China is starting to make mid-market ones (simple pneumatic ones that are powered bug geared to home use rather than professional like the ~$1k electric machines) for ~$400ish that I'd take seriously if I was in the market
Once you have a tire machine you'll spend more time at the tire shop (outside business hours, lol) because their trash pile will be your best source for reasonably new used tires. They sell a lot of sets of 4 when 2 would do.
definitely not easy by yourself, but the whole process (change, then alignment etc) shouldn't take a decent mechanic's shop more than a couple of hours. I've changed tires on my nearly 200k mile car several times now, and it's usually a few days for the tires to be delivered (in america the mechanic will just receive it) and a 2h appt to get the work done. I'm shocked your parent comment mentioned waiting a whole day at the mechanics'.
My friend does this at Costco, and it takes longer purely because of appt mismanagement and backup, the work itself is quick.
Being on the bottom rungs is actually a lot cheaper than "HN style" car ownership. Nobody expects your shitbox to be legal, or have compliant papers all the time. You're blue collar so you know people who wrench and trade favors here and there. Boss expects you to be late a few times a month.
There's a "welfare cliff" when you try to get into a "must have reliable transportation" job though
Lower end jobs tend to be unforgiving on not planting your butt in seat at the scheduled time. I find the higher end your job the less BS you are forced to endure. e.g. No drug tests, no doctor's note to justify sick leave. If there's a layoff there's severance. Flex time.
There are some accommodations for poor drivers. Politicians loath to raise fuel tax. This shifts costs of roads from drivers onto general taxpayers. Car insurance limits are the same as in the 1970s. This shifts cost of accidents from poor drivers onto accident victims who are not fully compensated. Emissions testing and safety testing is either not done at all or waived for drivers who claim hardship.
Converting away from cars costs almost nothing compared to continuing cars. The project to put California route 37 above water near the Sonoma-Marin County line is going to cost $10 billion without adding any capacity. That's one tiny little project. And people don't even want to attach a number to the external cost of pollution.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRSFRMACBS home loans delinquencies look amazing right now, to the surprise of noone, since everyone is sitting happy having locked in their 3% rates a few years back.
My understanding is that Tricolor went under due to systemic fraud ("The core of the fraud allegations is that Tricolor illegally used the same loan portfolios as collateral for separate credit lines with multiple banks" to the tune of ~$200M)
First Brands also went under due to fraud ("First Brands had relied on billions of dollars in undisclosed debt, primarily from the private credit market, by borrowing against its invoices. This practice, known as factoring, kept the debt off the company's official balance sheet")
Yes, things feel tighter than they did in the years immediately post-Covid because there was a lot of free $ in the system, a lot of debt collections were paused, and Covid went on long enough for people to start treating that as the new normal when that was never going to be the case.
No, I don't see these as canaries for a 2008-esque event.
The scary thing to keep an eye on is commercial office space debt (e.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HPP/) which is likely to cause a cascade of fire sales as 5/10 yr debt obligations come due and how that will have cascading effects on commercial bank loans. That will be a hairy situation, but, fortunately, once it passes, rents in downtown areas will plummet and there will be a huge surge in growth in response to more favorable rents. Right now, commercial rents are locked into untenable rates because the loans are contingent on those rates which is resulting in 30%+ unused commercial space in areas like downtown SF.
Yeah loan covenants lock you in like that. But banks don’t want to manage or sell big commercial properties. If it gets dicey for property owners, they’ll work out a deal with their bank.
Remember Getty:
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem.
If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
I'm surprised it has taken this long. Everything I thought I knew about economics (and basic finance) has pointed in the direction of imminent pain for consumers, but what I've been hearing is more of a dull ache at most.
I don't want a crisis, and if we avert one I'll happily update my beliefs. But even if the crisis comes I'll have to figure out why it has been so slow.
You’re probably underestimating how much credit is available to people. Having money issues? Keep paying your car while you borrow money from Klarna for your DoorDash chipotle.
I mean they hide it as best they can. Big restaurants like Applebee's you'll see "2 for $28" not priced at $28 so you can guesstimate the squeeze but otherwise you kinda have to go straight to Starbucks or McDonalds using a mobile app to order your "usual" to compare "here's what it looks like if I use DoorDash, here's what it looks like if I go myself," to find that the actual delivery fee is some $20-25 per order. Even worse, I'm pretty sure that they test algorithms to try to selectively lower this for new customers so that in the early days when you're more aware of the cost it seems like a steal.
Of course, you can arrive at the $20 just by thinking, "okay, I need someone to go do an errand for me, they'll have to drive to the restaurant, wait there for 15-20 minutes, and then bring it back... so it'll cost $15 for the hour of their time plus a few bucks of overhead for the platform plus a few bucks of messed-up-my-order insurance..."
Which gets us to 5 years from now when the DoorDash killer comes out, it'll be called Kourier or something starting with a K, and it'll start with trying to give Target a way to call up some extra trained Target employees, but they're cross-trained in packaging orders for K. One person will pick up 10 carefully-packaged K-orders, take them all to the central delivery hub, they'll get sorted into driverless cars that plot through some neighborhood some 10 stops, it'll be marketed as a real Amazon-killer and fly under DoorDash's nose -- InstaCart might balk, but DoorDash won't. Until they reveal some pizza-delivery partnership and suddenly within a year every restaurant has some K-employee working for them, whose job it is to batch orders down to the bikes that come by.
Sure, delivery times for Kourier will be 75, 80 minutes long at first. People won't mind because you pay $4 for delivery instead of $20. And Doordash/Amazon won't die, Amazon will just buy Kourier and DoorDash will focus on more rural locales.
I'll be disappointed if it isn't like Snow Crash (1992):
> The Deliverator, in his distracted state, has allowed himself to get pooned. As in harpooned. It is a big round padded electromagnet on the end of an arachnofiber cable. It has just thunked onto the back of the Deliverator's car, and stuck. Ten feet behind him, the owner of this cursed device is surfing, taking him for a ride, skateboarding along like a water skier behind a boat.
> In the rearview, flashes of orange and blue. The parasite is not just a punk out having a good time. It is a businessman making money. The orange and blue coverall, bulging all over with sintered armorgel padding, is the uniform of a Kourier. A Kourier from RadiKS, Radikal Kourier Systems. Like a bicycle messenger, but a hundred times more irritating because they don't pedal under their own power -- they just latch on and slow you down.
And while tipping is technically optional, it's de facto required. The driver will see the total pay for a delivery before they accept it, and if it's too low, they'll reject it, and DoorDash will offer the delivery to another driver. If you don't tip, then your delivery will be rejected until it reaches some driver that's gotten desperate. By that time, your food will likely have been already made and sitting and waiting for 30 minutes.
When the popular running theme of complaints is "it's impossible to do X because poor people all work 168 hours a week minimum", it's easy to excuse wasting your money to save time.
It took long because during the last Trump era, lenders figured out a neat trick - extend the loan terms to 7 years instead of the conventional 5. That, and the low interest rates hooked people. This exaggerated during the pandemic with people taking insane $1000/month loans.
Trump comes back, downturn comes back to main street, and voila - loans running naked.
One thing the article doesn't mention is deportees. The administration always says illegal immigrants but when you look the vast majority that are being deported are documented people here under some allowed process, they just haven't been granted a green card yet. Documented immigrants have work permits, social security cards, all the thing to find housing, get jobs, engage in banking etc...
When they're picked up and going to be deported, do you think they're going to care about their car loan, home mortgage or credit card debt? Not even a little bit. I had a friend here awaiting asylum for 7 years. She was picked up by ICE, sat for 3 months in detention, finally just agreed to leave because that's was long enough to be evicted by her apartment (and get significant fees for it) be defaulted on her credit cards, and on her car loan.
Who pays for all that debt, in excess of $20,000 for everything. She never will, she goes to another country, finds a decent paying job because she has years of experience in the US and now speaks English. All very valuable skills to a lot of employers in central and south America.
Expect to see a lot more loans being defaulted on. We were lied to about the number of illegals. Now we're going to see the effect of deporting people who were working, participating in the economy, and happy to be here. All because the lies saying they were illegal.
There was a meme (most likely fake) post on reddit from an H1b holder who took out as many lines of credit as they could and left after the whole fee debacle. But there's that dark kernel of truth inside: if your job prospects in the country are wrecked, what's stopping people from cashing in on the way out?
>One thing the article doesn't mention is deportees. The administration always says illegal immigrants but when you look the vast majority that are being deported are documented people here under some allowed process, they just haven't been granted a green card yet.
Documented != legal, one can be documented and an illegal immigrant. If you have a deportation order with a final date in the past, you are a documented illegal immigrant. If you're unlawfully in the US due to overstaying your visa, you are a documented illegal immigrant. Practically every case in the past year has proven out to be the person deported was illegal.
>Documented immigrants have work permits, social security cards, all the thing to find housing, get jobs, engage in banking etc...
Yet they can still be illegal immigrants.
>do you think they're going to care about their car loan, home mortgage or credit card debt?
The vast majority of illegal immigrants being deported have none of those things. All cash.
>Who pays for all that debt, in excess of $20,000 for everything. She never will, she goes to another country
Car gets repossessed, house gets foreclosed. The majority have miniscule or nonexistent credit card debt. Less than a rounding error for the economy as a whole.
Their deportation will increase housing supply, which reduces rent and home prices though!
>We were lied to about the number of illegals. ... All because the lies saying they were illegal.
You are factually incorrect. Documented means that they are legally allowed to be in the country which is why they have received work permits and that they have received social security numbers. They have a legal status which is why they are documented as being here. To say that they dealt in all cash is a factual lie. Where are you getting your data. I'm getting my data first hand from someone who was picked up and also had first hand accounts of hundreds of people in detention. All with work permits all with social security cards all who had legal jobs at the time of their detention. All of them were engaging in the normal commerce of a USA citizen which is to have a debt load and a credit rating. Do you think they had cash to pay for those vehicles? Do you think they had cash to pay for those houses? Do you think apartments don't run credit ratings? You are absolutely foolish to think that this is some massive 30 million people with a cash based underground. Modern banking doesn't work that way, almost no jobs pay that way. No jobs that you're going to get with a work permit and a social security card which is the vast majority of jobs. You think these people just pick your lettuce in the field. That's absolutely insane you really need to educate yourself because you have believed the lies that were told.
The law does not consider them illegal aliens. ICE does not classify them as illegal aliens. Only red-headed political ideologues that are looking for a boogeyman consider them illegal aliens.
You can say that it is a miniscule number of them having credit and debt but you need some evidence to back up your claims. Increasing housing supply at the cost of a greater burden for everyone else isn't a good way to do it. Because these were functioning taxpayer members of society. Then they became burdens to society because they were housed in detention facilities at an extraordinary cost along with the money lost for the proper eviction procedures and debt recovery procedures and everything else.
It is absolutely foolish to take people who were following the legal process and we're legally documented as being here putting them into tension centers causing them to default on their mortgages or their leases. Causing them to default on their car loans and their credit card debt. For you to act like it's a good thing is absolutely insane.
Because you believed the lies that these were illegal criminals that weren't allowed to be here. Go and read the lies of the news media. That's how it was presented. It only takes a small bit of logic to say if they were actually criminals that were not allowed to be here then they wouldn't know where they are. Because there would be no documentation. The fact that they could go get them so quickly was because they were allowed to be here and they were arbitrarily revoking parole statuses and other statuses of people that were granted permission to be here following the processes laid out in the law.
Now you will bear the financial burden for it. Because fools like you think that they were criminal illegal aliens. When they were not they were legal aliens. I highly suggest you go and review the actual many immigration statuses that are granted. Because there are many statuses where you are legally allowed to be in this country as an alien without being granted a visa. Once you have reviewed those I will await your apology.
I live in a city with lots of buses, they are great.
The problem is that they are neuropsychiatric units on wheels, there is always some crazy person being clinically crazy (like talking to imaginary friends), so that makes the whole ride something you don't want to experience often if possible.
We take the bus all of the time here in DC. I’ve literally never once encountered someone like that.
I’ve been panhandled a couple of times (in as many decades) and there’ve been a few people yelling at each other, but they left everyone alone.
On the driving front, though, I’ve had a bunch of people with anger management issues threaten to kill me and the only times in my adult life that I’ve credibly been threatened with a fistfight were by people driving who resented being expected to stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk. The bus crowd is a lot more chill.
Eh, that discourse is usually being advanced by people who never ride the bus, don't intend to start riding it, and have a personal interest in selling you a car. In real transit preference surveys, and historical outcomes, it is clear that people would ride a bus that goes to their destinations, comes often and reliably, and is reasonably priced, without regard to how many mental cases are aboard. So if a transit agency faces a choice of spending limited resources on policing the inside of the vehicle for lunatics, or adding a bus to the schedule, they should always choose the latter.
“it is clear that people would ride a bus that goes to their destinations, comes often and reliably, and is reasonably priced, without regard to how many mental cases are aboard”
If you believe this, it would be cause to doubt your sanity.
Does anyone else hate busses, and the only response you ever get after mentioning this is "NUH UH BUSSES CAN BE GREAT"?
A bus will pretty much always be inferior to a car. Mathematically impossible to run on time. It never gets you where you want to go, just kinda close usually. If one doesn't show up, there is no real feedback without an extensive background metadata system. Never as clean as your own car (unless you're one of those carbage-loving people I suppose, but then you're just going to litter on the bus anyways). Obnoxious, loud, smelly, or crazy people you have to deal with.
I'll never understand the crowd so desperate to have them, but I'll still support the cause if it cleans up the highways for me I guess.
> A bus will pretty much always be inferior to a car.
I never have to clean a bus, or put gas in it, or change its oil. I don't even have to drive it.
I don't have to dedicate a big portion of my property to storing it, just to pay to park it somewhere else when I go out. I'll never get a ticket for leaving it in the wrong place, and I'll never have to go to court because I used it wrong.
I don't have to worry about it getting stolen, or crashed into. I don't have to worry about being unable to afford the insurance or registration. I don't have any wealth tied up in it, so its deprecation doesn't matter.
Having to walk a few minutes at the start and end of my journey is a small price to pay for such convenience.
And if I ever do need one, I can rent one for less than the average American's monthly payment. In fact, I can rent the exact one I need that day, which might be a pickup today but a minivan tomorrow.
- Not having to perform the repetitive, mind-numbingly-dull-yet-somehow-simultaneously-stressful cognitive task of driving.
- Instead, having the freedom to engage in more relaxing, productive or creative pursuits in this era of smartphones; do work, watch videos, read books, sleep, or even just look out the window.
- Never having to deal with traffic jams. Or road rage.
- Getting a chance to walk places for free instead of paying to do the same thing on a treadmill in a gym.
Just looking at Google Maps, if I wanted to get to the city centre right now:
- Car: 22 minutes (and, er, park... somewhere? Who knows)
- Walk: 42 minutes
- Bike: 14 minutes
- Bus: 17 minutes (including 3 minutes walk)
- Train: 20 minutes (including 10 minutes walk)
Buses work in some places.
(Granted, this is traffic-dependent and the train would def beat it at rush hour in my particular case, particularly as Google Maps' time for walking is very conservative.)
I could fairly handily afford a car, but for my lifestyle, where I like, there just doesn't seem to be any real _point_.
You have severe misanthropy you need to work out in therapy. The possibility of encountering elderly people or children on your commute should not invoke this kind of reaction and it's weird that's the first place your mind went.
The answer is no, I do not mind people coming and going on the bus because I am a normal human. Not that your example is realistic anyway, I can't think of a time in the last few years any passenger has delayed my bus for 10 minutes (drivers, on the other hand...).
FWIW "some mediocre experience every single day" could just as easily describe sitting in traffic. At least on the bus I can play with my phone.
You find these arguments convincing because you're starting from "I hate the bus" and working backwards. That's not an honest way to have a conversation.
Gotta love these armchair psychologists who have no clue what they’re talking about. You made a whole psychological profile because I… came up with an example. Physically painful to have to converse in scenarios like this.
The fact that you think “transportation for people who explicitly cannot drive” is not a major draw of public transit, you’re crazy.
But of course, when you start from “I love the bus” and work backwards, I guess you weren’t interested in arguing honestly from the beginning, right?
Dublin is currently making changes to traffic flow to prioritise buses, with the result that some buses now go far faster than they used to. But because everything is in flux, and Dublin Bus hates updating timetables at the best of times, it is now somewhat common for a too-fast bus to stop for a few minutes to get back on schedule (complete with recorded message to that effect). It'll pass, but it is, for now, a thing.
(They've tweaked it now, but for a few months the bus I usually use to get from home to the city centre did this on about 30% of journeys.)
In most places I've lived, busses are for poor people. Because anyone else will pay whatever it takes to get a car and avoid something like a _three hour_ round trip for something 10 miles away. I'm not kidding; my work commute is 10 miles each way, in a city of way more than 1M, and it's 1.5 hours total for me to get to work on time.
I've lived in one place where they were great. Dense urban environments can do that, though. So nuh us busses can be great (the trains were even better), but it seems like the US has zero actual drive to make public transit not crap.
I've lived in a couple places with public transit way faster and more efficient than cars.
But because it's public, people can't be easily kicked off. Once I was caught between a knife fight; another time a schizophrenic person started to aggressively trap me in the corner while going on an increasing paranoid tirade.
Always amused by HN on buses. It seems that the median HN is basically okay with trains, but is convinced that if they ever set foot on a bus they will immediately be stabbed by 47 drug addicts, and then their soul consigned to Bus Hell. It's kind of comically hyperbolic.
I wonder where the dividing line is. Are HNs afraid of trams? Very Light Rail systems? Trambuses? Trolleybuses? BRTs? Railbuses? Someone should do a survey.
(Though thinking about it further, probably _should_ be afraid of railbuses, which are a bus chassis on rails; kind of amazing they were ever allowed really. Bizarrely, some were actually still in use in the UK til 2021 or so. Even more shockingly, there don't seem to have been many/any documented fatal incidents; one of the UK railbuses was destroyed more or less completely in a crash, but it was empty at the time.)
Nobody denies that if we all chip in to build a door-to-door freeway and free parking for you it will be cool for you. The question is whether we have better things to do with our money.
The average has just gone past $50l but it is not clear it will stay there. There are a few things that drove it up recently.
One contributor was a surge in EV sales to beat the expiration of the tax credits. EVs on average cost more than non-EVs so that pushed the average up. EVs were almost 12% of September sales with an average price of $58k.
There are plenty of EVs a lot lower that than that, so why was the average EV so high? That brings is to another contribution: in general it was upper-end buyers who currently dominate the market (the potential lower end buyers are probably too worried about the economy and maybe the likely big increases in health insurance for 2026 to buy a car now). Upper end buyers tend to go for the more luxurious cars, whether they are buying an ICE or EV.
Remember though, just because the average is about $50k doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of good new cars for a lot less. A 2026 Toyota Corolla has a base MSRP of $22 725. For $24 575 you can get the hybrid which increases the MPG from 32 city/41 highway to 53 city/46 highway.
A lot of that is that Americans are buying trucks, not cars. It’s easy to stay under $30k with a sedan, but a sizable group of people think they need the image of driving a full-sized pickup truck to the office and each 7 year loan on an $80k truck is going to drive the average up, not to mention leaving the buyer more cash-strapped due to the higher operating costs.
Yeah the average is high, that means there are cars cheaper than that. People are spending big because they either are doing no researchand getting suckered, or they are buying nicer cars for vanity reasons.
Automakers realized during the pandemic they could increase prices and reduce production and come out ahead. Import tariffs means you are, as a consumer, held captive by a domestic market to extract from you for your potentially non discretionary personal transportation needs. If you must have a car, the price is the price.
This has slowly been changing as of recently, but now tariffs are eating into automaker balance sheets to the tune of ~$30B, which will have to come from somewhere in transaction volume.
A few years ago my car was totaled by an uninsured illegal in a hit and run, and I was forced to get another one (bought used). This was back when the bubble was even worse, and since I lived on dirt roads, I needed a 4x4. Literally the only thing I could find not clapped out were luxury models, because rich people were about the only people at the time dumping cars that weren't completely clapped out.
> 10 years ago you could go onto a lot and buy a brand new Dodge Dart for around $17,000.
$17k 10 years ago is $23k today. That's under the MSRP of a 2026 Toyota Corolla.
In constant dollars car prices for comparable trim levels of similar styles of car have actually been have been pretty steady for the last 40 years or so. The average car is a lot more expensive now in constant dollars because the mix of cars bought has shifted significantly toward larger and more luxurious cars.
For example when I was looking for a new car earlier this year I looked at the Honda Civic. When I compared the price to my last Civic, which I bought in 1989, it was about the same after correcting for inflation since 1989. I also looked at the CR-V, and when comparing to my 2006 CR-V today's CR-V after correction for inflation since 2006 is actually about 5-10% cheaper.
Americans are really dumb and do next to no research on most purchases. I know several people who think that's a waste of time. The best that a lot of folks can do is a YouTube video.
Throw money at the problem. Learn nothing. Complain when things go bad.
That's what a ton of Americans do now and it's wild seeing it as often as I do. There was recently that Ars article that looked at a study showing how bad anti-intellectualism in this country has become. Being dumb is now a sort of prideful thing for a lot of Americans.
I once clicked on a YT video about irresponsible debts, apparently it's a popular genre there, don't do it or you'll get a flood of these for a few weeks minimum. The interesting note I saw there was that apparently in USA car credits are now reaching into 7 and 8 years length (from typical maximum of 5 or so) and their rates are reaching well into 20% or higher. And that's not on a housing, that's on depreciating expensive cars. Another new idea for me was the fact that people with car debt, are doing "trade-in" of sorts, giving up old unpaid car for a newer better one, with an even bigger total debt. That was really eye opening stuff.
> "Distress in auto lending broadly is often seen as a bellwether to changing circumstances in the US economy, because Americans particularly in the lower-income brackets tend to put their highest priority in auto payments," said Brett House...
Or, put another way, when the bills come in, people make their car payments first, because they have to get to work. So either there are other bills people aren't paying, or people aren't going to work. Both seem bad. One purported cause of increased auto loan defaults is that people are having to make student loan payments again, although that would suggest they aren't prioritizing the auto payments.
This goes way beyond the high price of cars or people taking out loans with bad terms.
Americans are struggling all over. Rent is skyrocketing. Inflation is applying massive pressure on regular expenses. Household debt is at an all time high. People all over the country are struggling to keep their utilities connected as energy prices soar. Foreclosures are surging. Individual chapter 7 bankruptcy filings are up 15% from last year too. It's really no wonder repossessions are spiking too.
Economically, things look pretty bleak for a huge percentage of Americans and I'm not seeing much to convince me that they're going to get better any time soon.
And yet Americans are door dashing more than ever and financing everything imaginable.
Not saying citizens deserve this but we eagerly gobble up every excuse possible and then complain that our lifestyles aren't sustainable.
The typical American lifestyle is based around excess. It's no surprise that a nation who spends 3x more on unnecessary garbage than any other nation is struggling financially as climate change makes that excess more expensive.
We do this to ourselves with our pride/ego fixation and our endless excuses for why someone else should fix things or someone else is responsible for it.
We don't vote. We don't think critically. We don't do the hard work to benefit our society long term. We buy into every possible excuse.
I think it has more to do with stagnating wages which haven't kept up with inflation (or for that matter productivity) than it does with irresponsible spending. The growing number of people who can barely keep the lights on aren't spending all their income on door dash. They're cutting back on groceries, going to food banks (who have seen record demand) and being forced to resort to Buy Now Pay Later loans for regular groceries (14% more than they were last year https://www.cbsnews.com/news/buy-now-pay-later-bnpl-loans-gr...)
Related: U.S. Consumers Are Collapsing: Cars, Credit, & the Chaos Ahead | The Weekly Wrap - Steve Eisman (Steve Carell’s character from The Big Short) interviews Lakshmi Ganapathi. Uploaded 2025-10-03.
Funny how a lot was going really well thanks to the last administration. Full employment, hot economy, and administration going after the billionaires. Wow...so much has changed in a year. We piss off the world, we implement tariffs hapharzardly, car and car prices soar and the rich get richer. Brace yourself....
They're typically sold at auction to dealers and individuals. If there's a flood of them, that means that they'll cost less at auction and the prices in the used car market may start coming back down from the crazy heights they've been at.
Depends on who is operating higher up in value ladder probably ends up in auctions by lenders. But lower cases it is revolving system. Where the seller takes vehicle back and sells it again. Sometimes multiple times...
You think so? Owner financed car loans and repossessions are incredibly profitable, typically the value of the car 3-4 times over. Or so I’ve been told by someone in that business.
As if I need to make another comment about a, or multiple bubbles, but something has to give and here it's of course the consumer. New and used car prices are at all-time highs (nominal it sounds like, but tell that to someone whose wages haven't kept pace (i.e., almost everyone)). Housing prices are at all-time highs (in terms of price:income so no qualifier needed there). Tariffs are not being 100% eaten by the producers (duh), nor by the importers (double duh), and so the consumer is being hit by those. Health care costs are about to rise materially as we flip to 2026 for large swaths (all?) of the US population. Any tax relief seen by the average consumer is likely not even close to enough to counterbalance all the increased prices/costs.
HN is fond of saying that the only thing propping up the US economy at this point is AI investment (not informed enough to know if that's actually true, but outside of equity prices it sure seems like everything else is blinking "this economy sucks.").
So when will the music stop? Seems like it should've been "yesterday," but what's the argument for it to continue playing for the foreseeable future? The great wealth transfer? AI efficiency/productivity gains (without the vast elimination of jobs)? Something else?
On paper, nothing will happen. The wealthy in America will continue to get wealthier. Real estate and stocks will soar in value.
In reality, the dollar's true value will plummet. The FED is starting to lower interest rates again. We are likely going to undergo brutal inflation.
Crashing the economy is obviously very politically unpopular. The left/right will do whatever they can to keep this charade up, even if it means dooming the working class and throwing them some kind of bone to make them think they're ok.
The COVID pandemic was a good example of this. The working class got thrown a $2,000 check while there was billions given to bail out businesses/lots of fraud. Not a lot of people cared because hey, we got a $2k check... Even though that $2k check was not even close to maintaining their relative wealth pre-pandemic due to all of the government's inflationary measures.
There won't be a recession, it won't happen on paper. But the middle/working class will continue to be squeezed. And there will be programs to "rescue us." Maybe it's low cost home programs, maybe it's community college, I'm not sure. But I am sure it will never truly benefit the working/middle class, it'll just be a token to keep them from fully dying.
The value of the dollar has already plummeted, 10% or so this year. It's expected that 2026 will have an equal dollar devaluation. This is the best-possible interpretation of the goals of this administration, the so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord that is somehow supposed to help some part of the economy. It's unclear who or how, to me.
> The value of the dollar has already plummeted, 10% or so this year.
Compared to what? From Nov 3, 2024: the USD against:
GBP (3)%
JPY (1.7)%
EUR (6.7)%
INR 4.6%
AUD 1.3%
CAD .74%
RMB .4%
The EUR (if that is what you are going by) is unusually strong, and that's actually starting to cause issues. But the dollar isn't "collapsing".
> > The value of the dollar has already plummeted, 10% or so this year.
> Compared to what?
In terms of the DXY "US Dollar Index"
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DX-Y.NYB/
The dixie is weighted heavily towards the Euro (~58% weight). The euro is enough to move the index independently of other movers.
Is the euro weighted at 58% for a reason?
Its fixed at that proportion by the index cboe. The dixie weakening is indistinguishable from the euro strengthening
The BRL or CNY is probably one of the most apt comparison given the BRICKS alliance. That's where you are seeing the roughly 10% swing since Jan. (if you go back to last Oct the swing is less pronounced. IDK exactly what was happening last Oct, but there appears to have been an upswing in dollar value from Oct to Jan and a steady decrease of the dollar value since.)
RMB is CNY and listed.
In October of last year, people were betting on Trumps election leading to tariffs leading to a stronger dollar. This trend continued post-election pre-inaguration. Since the tariffs did not materialize to the level expected, the dollar weakened to its levels prior to his election.
Your explanation makes no sense. First, nobody thought that Trump would actually go through with the tariffs because it's an insane plan and that wiser people in the administration would restrain Trump. So the dollar started to devalue when people realized that "holy shit these tariffs might actually happen." The tariffs are way way bigger than anybody expected.
The entire goal of the tariffs were to weaken the dollar:
> The Mar-a-Lago Accord is a proposed economic and trade initiative of the Donald Trump administration during his second term. Named after Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, the Accord is a blueprint for restructuring global trade and monetary relations. Its core goal is to devalue the dollar while preserving its role as the world reserve currency, a careful balancing act intended to avoid the contradictions described in the Triffin paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_Accord
No, ordinarily tariffs result in currency appreciation (see https://www.wto.org/english/blogs_e/ce_ralph_ossa_e/blog_ro_... for an accessible discussion).
But yes: weaking the dollar was the goal, but the US did not achieve that to the degree of something like the Plaza accords.
> would actually go through with the tariffs because it's an insane plan and that wiser people in the administration would restrain Trump.
What is insane is to assume republicans picked by Trump will restrain Trump. The adults in the room theory was disproven long before that election.
Trump 1.0 had tarriffs. Trump talked abput tarrifs. People in fact assumed Trump will do tarriffs, they just slightly underestimated how bad the trade war will be.
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Reply, since I cant edit: even the commentators agrees it's looking increasingly necessary to weaken the euro: https://archive.is/biCxs
> The EUR (if that is what you are going by) is unusually strong
By what standards? It’s slightly above the trend (i.e. continuous decline since 2008 with an occasional up and down here and the) but not that substantially
It's substantial for the eurozone economy, namely their exporters. The machinery sector in particular is under major pressure as a result of the stronger euro.
https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...
That operates on calendar year. That is primarily due to the rapid appreciation of the USD vs global based after Trumps election on the perception that tariffs would be far higher and more continuous than they actually were.
The truth is, the currency markets are roughly where they were about a year ago, with the exception of EUR, but thats a special case which I think is a symbol if a misstep by the ECB.
Yes, the calendar year matches what I was talking about, and more closely matches the current economic policy of the US. It wasn't until February that the real economic and foreign policy of the US became clear, and the full insanity of it all is still sinking in.
I'm not sure why your hand-picked list of currencies is revelant, or why your particular dates are relevant. The course for the future looks to be a greater devaluation of the US currency.
This is the goal of the Trump administration and what is apparent to analysts.
> I'm not sure why your hand-picked list of currencies is revelant, or why your particular dates are relevant. The course for the future looks to be a greater devaluation of the US currency.
What other currencies do you believe are important? We pulled 2-5 of the most commonly used reserve currencies and some other ones as well.
EUR was unusually strong from 2004 to 2015. Since then, it has almost always been between $1.07 and $1.20, which I would consider the normal range.
The EUR is unusually strong, in part due to fiscal tightness by ECB (see their balance sheet L2 Liabilities here https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/annual-reports-financial-sta...) compared to the US. This is having a knock-on effect that the EUR strengthens against the dollar, which actually causes a whole host of problems for an export economy.
It's why you see Lagarde calling for a reserve EUR; it's the only way to export EUR at this point. But that's a topic for another time.
I don't see any evidence that EUR is particularly strong against USD. Except maybe if you take a very short-term perspective. There is always some volatility in exchange rates, and export businesses that cannot tolerate 10% swings in either direction are not viable in the first place.
> I don't see any evidence that EUR is particularly strong against USD. Except maybe if you take a very short-term perspective.
Yes; this is a short term perspective. Europe is functionally an export market and these currency fluctuations hurt badly. For example, Mercedes-Benz had a consolidated profit margin in '22 of around 9%. These swings do either force loss of jobs (bad) or require a devaluation of the currency.4
Europe was also an export market in the past. Back in early 2002, 1 EUR was worth less than 0.9 USD. Then it started climbing rapidly and reached a peak of 1.6 USD in mid-2008.
The value of money is inherently unpredictable. The exchange rate between EUR and USD has never been stable longer than about 1.5 years. Something unexpected always happens, and then the rate goes up or down by 10% or even more. You either tolerate that or try protecting yourself with various financial instruments.
When a currency strengthens against another as the Euro did from the aught until now it weakens that markets export
That's why a strong euro is a porblem
Comparing against other currencies are tricky, they often move in a similar direction at different rates.
Exactly what people are saying here (the USD is weakening at an alarming pace! Americans are going Weimar Republic!) isn't borne out in the data. We aren't seeing the USD weaken against other countries in an independent manner. That's the point; not to prove that we are seeing a stalwart dollar, but that we are seeing roughly "business as usual".
There are concerning scenarios when all currencies lose, or gain, spending power at a similar rate.
Sure, but I think we are seeing the US's future more in France at the moment than a secular decline against all other developed nations. There are very real questions about how society is structured that need to be resolved, but the US is far from alone or the worst in that regard.
>The COVID pandemic was a good example of this. The working class got thrown a $2,000 check while there was billions given to bail out businesses/lots of fraud.
A lot of people were paid more to not work during COVID restrictions than they earned before or after. $653 billion in federal funds for unemployment programs.
People were getting $600 per week from the feds for a while, then $300/week. Not a single $2000 check, $2400 per month. About the bottom 25 percentile were brought up to 25th percentile income.
>Crashing the economy is obviously very politically unpopular.
But not something one worries or cares about if one doesn't worry about having to be elected and/or is willing to use the military to suppress dissent...
So tanking the economy is a way to keep and maintain power...
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>> In reality, the dollar's true value will plummet
But it's good. There is no way to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US while dollar is strong.
Also high inflation may make housing more affordable.
If manufacturing is to return to the USA, it will be as fully automated as technically possible. So forget about jobs, there won't remotely be as many as needed to "reboot the working class"
The effect of weakening the dollar is not to return manufacturing jobs to the US while allowing the same dollars to buy the same products. It's to make imported goods more expensive so domestically produced ones win out in the marketplace, both in and outside of the US. To make you switch because your favorite products become too expensive.
It's to make you chose Californian wine over French one, so to speak. Whether you are in the US or elsewhere.
If technological advancement is going to kill the working class, this might slightly accelerate that development but it does not change it one way or the other.
I still don’t understand the point of all this exercise. In the long run, without a fairer redistribution of wealth within US society (which isn’t going to happen with these polices and the politicians pushing them) forcing re-shoring will still result in higher prices overall: expensive Made in USA products, and expensive imports due to a weak dollar. So why?
> In reality, the dollar's true value will plummet.
It already has. It's down ~12% vs the EUR. It's even down 4% vs CAD, and Canada's on the front line of having its economy destroyed by Trumponomics. When the global markets have more confidence in the Canadian dollar than the American one, good luck...
It's probably much higher than that in reality if you look at assets spiking compared to the dollar. Gold is going completely parabolic right now. Real estate shows no signs of slowing down. Crypto (regardless of your opinion of it) is spiking as people try to store value anywhere besides the dollar. We hear about the AI bubble propping up equity markets all the time but I always wonder how much of it is just investors desperately converting dollars into anything else with a bit of liquidity.
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We've got an insane bubble right now. Quantum computing stocks are valued at $50b market cap with 0 revenue and no substantial finished products. Just research.
Remember when "unicorn" companies were a big deal. Billion was significant amount of valuation and money. Lately it really feels like billion is pretty much nothing anymore. There has been inflation, but not that much to really make billion to be small sum.
The high end seems to be wildly out of control. We have $trillion+ companies now, and we are likely to see the world's first individual USD trillionaire within the next 12 months.
Oooh any public ones?
edit: OMG. I will be shorting these.
All of them: https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/10/17/ionq-rgti-qbts-qub...
It makes no fucking sense for any of these to be trading above $10.
Hey now, you can't say they don't have any product. We got a machine which can factor number 15 now. (with a preparation time for this calculation of only a few month) Isn't that amazing? We will be breaking RSA2048 any day now. Let's invest a few hundred billions into changing encryption everywhere! /s
>So when will the music stop? Seems like it should've been "yesterday," but what's the argument for it to continue playing for the foreseeable future? The great wealth transfer? AI efficiency/productivity gains (without the vast elimination of jobs)? Something else?
They seem to have figured out that you can just simply stop caring about the needs of 90% of your population if you systematically withhold any wealth from them and concentrate it to the 10%. The plan it seems is that the economy will increasingly be driven entirely by the upper middle class and above (who are all doing better now than they ever have in history), while the rest of us are left to rot and serve their drinks and clean their homes. The future for the average North American is starting to look a lot like our southern counterparts, where the wealthy elites in the cities rule over an underclass of destitute poverty everywhere else.
Historically, this has ultimately led to revolutions.
There's been some development in crowd control, no? AI and robots will make this even better.
DISREGARD YOUR PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND JOIN THE REBELS
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Historically, it did not. What actually does lead to revolution is regime becoming weak and unable to organize. You can keep people in horrible conditions and there will be no revolution, because dissenters will get stopped long before they anywhere near organizing themselves.
It is when the powerful become the weak that revolution can happen. And it takes more then one round of it till reasonable government emerges again.
>Historically, this has ultimately led to revolutions.
Which is why they've spent the last 50 years pitting the lower classes against themselves with meaningless culture wars. In a world with F-16s, Apache helicopters, and panopticon digital surveillance, there will never be armed revolution again (nor would anyone actually want that); the only option is nonviolent resistance. But it'll never happen in the US since we have zero class solidarity, and are all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Haha, funnily enough they said the same thing before 1918. They also said a bunch of Vietnamese farmers could never beat a world class military. Have faith in your fellow workers and hold on to the hope that a better world is possible.
As someone who knows people who fought that war on the other side, the vast majority were professionally trained soldiers, not Huy the illiterate rice paddy farmer who took an AK-47 and took pot shots at Americans.
There's a reason much of the older generation of Viet military and political leadership studied in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, BSSR, and RSFSR and why both the Vietnamese Army and the MPS still send their officers and leadership track personnel to train in Belarus and Russia to this day.
Heck, Russian is still an fairly popular language choice for Viet students targeting civil service or police careers.
Furthermore, a ragtag army of farmers would not have been able to fight against the PLA in 1979 or overthrow the PRC's lackeys and backed by the US in Cambodia and Laos in the 1980s-1990s.
It's also why you find so many Vietnamese in Prague, Warsaw, East Germany, Minsk, and Moscow to this day.
The fiction of "illiterate paddy farmers pushed American soldiers out" is just a salve around the reality that the US abandoned South Vietnam in order to seal the US-China deal in the early 70s that helped contain the USSR in the late 20th century.
Sure, but this time it's not different. The play has always and forever will be to try and force most of the population into a peasant caste be removing education and welfare, as well as setting up nice circular infighting.
It will inevitably end up as it always does. Or we'll all die horribly. You know, either way.
Who is trying to remove education and welfare and how are they accomplishing it? I have high doubts people actually want those things removed, especially in a country as great as the US.
Conservative evangelicals want to remove public schooling and move everyone to homeschooling as much as possible.
That sort of society fits their ideological and social goals in more ways then one.
> be removing education and welfare
Both of these are historical anomalies; the middle class developed prior to their ever having been implemented.
As the Palestinian resistance has shown, the vietnamese, the cubans, etc it is very difficult to defeat a population that doesn't want to give in even if you have fancy toys and a huge kill ratio.
The Vietnamese and Cubans were funded by the Soviets trying to expand their empire. They were proxy war fighters for a nuclear power. Sure they were kind of rag tag but only because the Soviets considered all soldiers to be disposable.
The out of work tradesman going into the Fairfax VA or Berkley CA Whole Foods (IDK if either of these places have Whole Foods, but they seem like they could) in the year 2030 and dusting the avocados with anthrax won't care whether the anthrax is funded by China or Russia, just that it winds up in the lungs of the people who've run his country into the ground.
With the way the FDA is going, anthrax is just going to be stocked in that middle aisle at Whole Foods.
While I think terrorists should care who is using them and why, that wasn't my point.
My point was that the parent comment's examples weren't of a difficult to defeat determined population. They were warlords helping imperialists establish nuclear bases so the Soviets could project power. Everything else is just a fairy tale.
They tell all sorts of fairy tales to get soldiers to march into certain death and have throughout history.
the vietnamese in particular lost millions of people to america. they won.
the palestinians have fought using a home grown weapons program based on harvesting israeli bombs. they are still alive.
american nuclear weapons are stationed all over the world and have a ring of bases around asia. every accusation is a projection
My understanding is that historically, popular uprisings only succeed when part of the established power allows it to happen or tags along for their own reasons. This includes the military.
I would be happy to be pointed at some exception to this.
I think as people get further squeezed there is only one way to go and that is mass strikes. It’s likely things have to get worse before people are forced into the only realistic option.
The economy is a lie. There is no the singular, hive mind economy. There are several segments and it's growing ever lopsided and moving K-shaped. The so-called "precariat" are hurting very badly. It doesn't matter what sort of imaginary, incestuous valuations NVIDIA et. al. attain because it doesn't trickle down in any measurable fashion. There is an pervasive profit-price spiral of necessities is a huge contributor of ongoing and deepening inflation. And the random tariffs / punitive federal sales taxes are yet another inflationary policy. The ultra rich can and will deny technological un(der)employment is happening until the pitchforks come out, and then blame the poor for being lazy/stupid/slow/unfortunate/antifa/whatever.
we learned our lessons from 2008 and 2020. my random thoughts
1) money has nowhere else go for now
2) great wealth transfer = really doesn't matter as long as the super rich can keep inflating their wealth faster than us peons. if you are above that curve just stay ahead of it at all costs.
3) prolonged pain can be extended indefinitely for most people by keeping them perpetual renters / extending loan terms.
4) all else fails print more money and i guess when it all does collapse doesn't matter, retreat to X country or bunker (lol)
> if you are above that curve
Is it possible to know if you're above 'that' curve? Does above the curve mean your assets are increasing in value faster than inflation?
I think to be above the curve requires being the first to receive the freshly printed money to buy more assets before they inflate further. You need to be first to benefit... So grift off the government contracts that lead/cause more printing.
> New and used car prices are at all-time highs (nominal it sounds like
Well, yes, nominal. But no, not really. Cars (and really this isn't surprising) have been getting steadily more affordable over time. They represent about half the fraction of consumer income that they did in the 80's. AS ALWAYS, please just go to FRED to ask these questions before announcing incorrect answers on the internet. New car price[1] expressed as a fraction of median income:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NbqH
[1] Actually it's new car CPI, so the values are unitless.
It's an extremely inconvenient situation that Americans find themselves in, a sort of self-perpetuating cycle of car dependency that they reinforce because alternatives require far too much investment to make worthwhile.
I'm really glad that I can live in a city without having to own a car if I don't want to. It makes a significant difference to my monthly expenses. And, honestly, it's a lot nicer and feels a lot more free in many ways. Places are more accessible not less.
I can't imagine being on the bottom rung of society and having yet another awkward expense, especially because you become unreliable if you don't properly invest in the maintenance of the thing. Which might cause you to lose your income altogether.
It sucks that you need to own a car to get anywhere in most of the US. When my wife and I moved to Southern California from Chicago, we had a single car and tried to make that work for a while, but it was just not doable. We have a grocery store 2 miles away, but any other services are further than walking distance (and even the grocery store requires walking on the shoulder of a busy arterial road at a couple points. I used to bike everywhere in Chicago, but doing so here is too risky).
That said, the problems of car loans are far beyond that - From the article: " The average monthly repayment now stands at more than $750.". That's nuts! I make a solid upper middle-class income, and I can't imagine spending that much on car financing, regardless of the loan length. When we needed a second car, we bought a 6-year-old Volvo station wagon in good condition, it it's still serving us well. Many of my neighbors, who make about half what I do, think we're poor because of it.
Exactly. This is going to come off as incredibly privileged, but I'm not a huge fan of car loans. In fact, I'm not a huge fan of leveraging to afford any asset unless it's appreciating in value or generating income. I buy and drive old, nearly junker cars because I can't afford a $40K new car. I can "afford" the monthly payments on a $40K car, but it's just a terrible financial idea. Totally nutty. A $750 monthly payment (I don't even want to know the term) for something that is losing value every day is absolutely bonkers.
The amount of debt Americans routinely and causally take on is honestly ridiculous.
The standard recommendation of taking out sent so you can invest your money and "make it work for you" frustrates me to no end.
Yes, on paper I can accrue more wealth if I mortgage my house and invest that same amount elsewhere. No, I would not trade owning a house outright for having a house that will be taken from me if I can no longer pay, strict insurance requirements, and a pile of someone else's debt that I call money and ignore the risk implied in investing in someone else's gamble.
I don't think gp comment is advocating doing a cash out re-finance, but to exploit leverage when first financing the purchase.
I used to be very debt averse. Owing a six figure sum seemed like a huge burden. Now I understand that mortgagees are non-callable. If you put 20% down that removes a lot of risk of being underwater. Fannie Mae is eating inflation risk for you. It's a way of smoothing expenses over multiple life stages. With a 30 year mortgage you can get a smaller payment when you're younger, earning less, and paying for daycare. When you're older you're earning more, might be an empty nester, and inflation has made each payment easier. By not rushing to pay off low interest debt you've effectively transferred money from 50 year old you to 30 year old you.
If you stayed employed, locked in a 3% mortgage, and contributed to your 401k, you won the wealth re-distribution game of 2020-2022.
Respectfully, you're effectively describing the argument I take issue with.
> Now I understand that mortgagees are non-callable.
How are you defining non-callable? If you stop paying on your mortgage that sent will eventually be called and you will be kicked out.
> If you put 20% down that removes a lot of risk of being underwater
That removes the risk of being underwater for any market correction sub-20%. Real estate prices in any areas have grown more than that ovwr the last few years, the risk of a 20%+ correction is on the table.
> With a 30 year mortgage you can get a smaller payment
And a 40 year loan would be even smaller. Where do we draw the line, and why? 30 year loans weren't always the norm, you don't have to go too far back to find an average mortgage on 10 or 15 year loans.
> When you're older you're earning more, might be an empty nester, and inflation has made each payment easier.
Income doesn't always move up, and inflation only makes payment easier if you (a) secured a fixed rate loan and (b) stay in the same home long term.
> By not rushing to pay off low interest debt you've effectively transferred money from 50 year old you to 30 year old you.
Or if it doesn't work out, 30 year old you has a home at the expense of 35 year old you.
> If you stayed employed
That's a big if, and you not only need to stay employed, you need wages to at least keep up with true inflation. Your 401k won't matter until you are at an age where you can withdraw, or we have another pandemic-style response where we allow people to cash in 401ks without the early withdrawal fees.
I agree - I think it’s bad advice. And cars make even less sense than houses, which should hopefully appreciate in the long run. People think of car loans like “free money” if I can buy a car on credit and pocket the spread between my investments and my APR.
The problem is:
1) that encourages you to buy more car (and lose more money in depreciation and fees) than you would if you just paid cash for a cheaper car
2) there’s no guarantee you can beat your APR in the short run (to beat your APR you almost always have to move out on the risk frontier… T bills are not doing it)
I view it as: if capturing that marginal spread of whatever% is important to you, you are spending too much money and you’re probably taking your eye off a bigger loss you’re taking by spending all that.
It’s not ridiculous, it’s how the whole system works. People need to live their lives, and if they only way they can get around (or throw a birthday party, or have a funeral, or some other human thing) is to borrow money, they borrow money. Which in turn props up a huge proportion of the businesses that make up the economy.
The problem with old junkers is that if you don’t have the money in cash, how do you fix a major car repair? You can get a loan for a new car with money.
The car “generates income” because it allows you to get to work and hopefully make more than your car note.
Old car repairs generally don't cost as much as you'd expect, especially when you aren't paying $750/no on a loan plus higher insurance premiums.
My mechanics often perk up when I bring in my 80s era pickup. It has very low miles, they can generally diagnose it with very basic tools, and parts are cheap. When I have the time to work on it myself I appreciate it for those exact same reasons.
Yea, that $750/mo that you're now not paying can be saved to pay for the occasional repair bill that you're going to face while owning a junker car you didn't take on a loan for. Or, not, if you bought a 1995 Toyota Camry or something which is probably going to outlive you.
>s probably going to outlive you
You mean "rod the block next week because it was used as an uber and before that it was owned by three successive hipsters who didn't change the oil because 'lol it's a Toyota' or whatever"
Dollar for dollar Toyotas were a bad buy as soon as Reddit started trying to tell everyone to buy them.
Right. I buy old cars, but I'm picky as hell and buy ones that have been taken care of, still have parts availability, and are models with proven reliability.
I still recommend anyone buy a later model Buick Lesabre if you find one in good shape. They're very cheap, the 3800 motor is excellent, and are still very comfortable rides that get around 30mpg on the highway.
3800 is in a lot of things. Chevy impala, Monte Carlo, etc. lots of cars benefit from that reliable and easy to maintain engine. Also gets decent gas mileage (not earth shattering but mid-high 20s is friendly to most bank accounts).
Yeah I'll keep an eye out for all of them when I'm in the market. I generally find the best results with the Buicks though, its more common to find one in good shape with a good service history.
The one I drive now was a one owner, it was literally a little old lady's Sunday church car that she sold because she decided to give up her keys. Its not perfect, and the AC compressor needed to be replaced, but they were the kind of owners that took it in ever 3k miles to a mechanic they trusted and fixed whatever the shop recommended.
My first car was a Katrina-damaged Impala that smelled like puke until I hit it with an ozone generator. Drove it for almost 6 years including twice cross country. Most I ever put into it was a new water pump.
And when you buy the car hypothetically and the motor goes out or the transmission within three months?
And it’s one thing if your car breaks down on a side street, it’s completely different if it breaks down on an interstate. If you have a daughter would you be comfortable with her driving an unreliable car? Your wife? Your mother?
Sure, your motor or trans can go out on any vehicle and unless you still have a warranty its your problem.
It sucks if you spend $3500 on a car only to spend another $2000 because the transmission went out and the timing was bad luck. I wouldn't recommend anyone buy an old car I'd they have no emergency fund left after the purchase though.
My wife does regularly drive our old cars. If it dies on the highway we'll deal with it. I don't have a daughter, but I wouldn't worry about my kid driving the kind of old cars I pick up - I'm patients picky, and able to work on them myself. The car would be the least of my worries if I had a young daughter with a drivers license.
You can also take out a loan from a credit union for the repair bill on your older car. Or even putting it on a credit card is an option.
A $3k repair loan is a lot easier to pay off than a $30k new car loan.
A lot of the people I know try to justify “new car fever” and will use some version of “I don’t feel safe in it anymore” or “I don’t think I can trust it.”
It’s a lot easier to get a secured loan for a car than an unsecured loan depending on your credit.
I’ve only had new car fever once. When I was 25 and bought my second car - a Mustang in 1999. I drove my Mercury Tracer that my parents bought me in 1991 as a junior in high school.
But that car was wrecked in 2008. I gave my next car - a Honda Civic - to my step son in 2014 and my next car after that - a 2012 Chevy Sonic bought slightly used from CarMax in 2020 when I started working remotely and we went down to one car.
But I would still much rather by a cheap newish car that I don’t have to worry about than a beater that might put me down or more importantly my wife.
> I can "afford" the monthly payments on a $40K car, but it's just a terrible financial idea.
I like to say that I can afford it, I just don’t want to and refuse to afford it.
Americans finance things to keep up imagery.
This country is insanely ego and pride focused or fixated.
Capitalism exploits this in advertising.
Americans throw money at everything and then wonder why they're broke.
Or in the case of cars, people finance a new car and throw money at repairs instead of doing what folks like you and I do. Buy a reliable older car that's cheap to work on. But that takes "learning" and most Americans are convinced that learning is a waste of time, just throw money at the problem.
A common advertising technique is to exploit peoples' problems. Buy Product(tm) and your problem(s) will be solved! Sometimes this problem doesn't even exist but the advertiser will exploit your fear. If you don't buy Product(tm) for your family you don't love them/are putting them in danger/you are not a real man!
Our solution to this was two cars, with one being a tiny well used EV (2015 Fiat 500E) where the range boils down to "dont leave town". Its a fantastic city car. 50% to full is about 3 hour on a 120v wall charger, and that's enough juice to run around our town for a ~week for all kinds of errands.
The other car is a 2023 Leaf with the extended range trim, which is sufficient to get us all around the PNW, although I would hesitate to take it east of the Cacades.
If the Volvo us well taken care of, it will probably last decades more.
> Many of my neighbors [...] think we're poor because of it.
How do you know that? They told you outright?
It doesn’t take that much to for huge numbers of people to be able to transfer to car free existence. Zoning laws inside cities do a amazing amount to force cars on millions of Americans.
Car free access to existing transit hubs like metro stations is often horrible and not particularly expensive to improve.
Cities could create bus and bike lanes literally overnight. Load up a truck with concrete parking curbs and cones and drop them. No one is going to bike until the infrastructure makes it safe and convenient. Like safe enough to let a kid or 65 year old woman bike.
We just choose to continue subsidizing a triangle of car dependency. The government finances toll-free roads, mandates parking minimums, and enforces restrictive zoning. Businesses and real estate consumers pick up the tab on the real cost of free parking (higher rents and mortgages, parking garage construction costs). Drivers pour money into car loans, insurance, maintenance, and fuel.
I'm glad you have that opportunity too, but purely on the financials it's probably not so much of a win when you consider the heightened cost of everything (housing in particular) in a city, right?
Cities are artificially expensive becuase we ban them in nearly every location in the US, and ban new housing in cities.
It would have been an easy fix 10+ years ago, but as the housing crisis got worse and the working class was priced out, building got a lot more expensive and we have a huge labor crisis in addition to the regulatory crisis.
All solvable, but the political establishment and the political power base (homeowners and landlords) are dead set against solving it.
Depends on the city.
Chicago is cheaper than car dependent LA in terms of rent.
You can do very well on a modest salary.
Depends when you got into it. If you're an older gen, you got into that city early and are likely unburdened by high dwelling costs - instead, you've got a windfall of appreciation ahead of you.
Reality is, outside of housing, city life is generally cheaper because it's much more accessible and the tax base is better suited to covering those expenses. So, older generations get the best of all worlds, per usual.
> Outside of housing
> Outside of what makes it more expensive for virtually everyone, it is actually cheaper
Pull up the age demographics for any major city. The older demographics largely got into housing at more affordable times and are less sensitive to rent and mortgage prices increasing. Housing costs is a cost that OVERWHELMINGLY impacts younger demographics.
I live in Malmö which is across the bridge from Copenhagen.
It's not comparable to the US in terms of Salary, but if I compare to the same size City in the UK (Coventry), it's not more expensive to live here than there. Coventry has a decent amount of car dependency for its size.
If we're comparing to a US City, I guess Orlando is pretty close (Orlando has a lower population than Malmö), but home prices are higher. However, there are only larger houses available making the comparison a bit squiff.
You don’t have to be in a large or even a medium sized city for car dependency to be alleviated. There’s a not just bikes video about this exact thing.
https://youtu.be/ztpcWUqVpIg
Housing and transportation should be considered a single budget category. If you can get rid of a second car but pay $500/mo more in rent it could be a wash.
This is an extremely privileged viewpoint. Even in Tokyo, people in the bottom half of the income distribution do not live close enough to popular transit lines to be as mobile as someone with a beater car in Dallas. They spend a lot more time commuting (and they can’t “just do some work on the train” because they have real jobs). Even in Tokyo, their commutes are crowded, they’re subject to the weather.
Being tied to transit lines—again, because even in Tokyo transit isn’t as convenient as point-to-point car travel—limits where people can look for jobs. That makes it a poverty trap because people can’t easily find jobs in different areas. And it makes having a family and kids much more logistically complicated. The most transit-dependent cities have abysmal birth rates.
It's only privileged because I'm living in a city that has actively prioritised other modes of transport.
I invite you to compare Orlando and Malmo.
If you have the opportunity to visit both, I would recommend it. They have the same population size (actually, Malmo has more people in it, but, close enough) yet in one it's impossible to get across the street without a car, even to go to the grocery store, and the other has entire portions of the city where cars aren't even able to go. -- Yet everyone manages to get around, and most people would consider it very convenient to do so.
Why are you comparing the cities based on whether you can get around “without a car?” In America, even the vast majority of the poorest people have a car. 96% of occupied housing units in Osceola County (where Orlando sits) have a car. American cities are optimized for that.
It’s almost certainly more convenient to get around Orlando by driving (as long as you aren’t going to Disney) than taking transit in Malmo. There is no city in the world where transit is more convenient and flexible than driving. I visit Tokyo once or twice a year, and even in Tokyo it’s usually more convenient to take an Uber than to take the train. And you’re not going to do better than Tokyo in terms of transit.
You can see this in the statistics. The average commute time of someone in the greater Tokyo area is 1 hour and 40 minutes round trip, or about 50 minutes one way: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu.... The average commute time for someone in Dallas County is under 30 minutes one way: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113. And the American commute is by yourself in a climate controlled car, instead of a crowded (even if clean and punctual) train.
The reason I’m talking about my city in particular is because everybody (even the poorest) can get around without a car and I’m not talking about just public transport.
It’s very liberating, even for children to be able to get around if not everything requires the use of a car.
I am aware that Orlando has optimised itself in a certain way, which makes it impossible to be any other way. That means being mildly convenient requires a complete overhaul of the whole system just for a small select group of people which is obviously unfavourable.
One of the major benefits of not being car dependent in particular is that there are more options not just public transport, you can get around by car- but there is also cycling, E-scooters, walking is more convenient, and of course there are buses trains and taxis. There’s even a bike rental scheme which covers the entire city and is so cheap as to be effectively free ($20 per year). With that in mind I find the argumentation that poor people have a worse time to be disingenuous- owning a car is the second largest expense most people have.
Malmo by the way is one of the poorest cities of the large cities in Sweden. I don’t know what the GDP per capita is compared to Orlando, but I’m not going to think that it’s much different to be perfectly honest with you.
Are you saying that it’s faster to get around Malmo on transit than in a car? I can see that being true for some route, but it’s unlikely unless you’re wealthy enough to live and work very close to transit stations.
When I lived in New York I did have a commute where transit was faster than driving. But it was like Mad Men—I went from my fancy high rise right next to the train station to my fancy law firm right next to another train station. That was a lovely commute, even compared to driving in the suburbs. But most people in New York (or Tokyo) cannot afford to live so close to popular transit lines.
> With that in mind I find the argumentation that poor people have a worse time to be disingenuous- owning a car is the second largest expense most people have.
That’s what we call “penny wise and pound foolish.” Cars is capital equipment, and get handed down through families. Like any capital equipment, they depreciate and require maintenance. But they also enable people to earn money. I have relatively poor in laws: my wife’s grandmother raised four kids as a waitress, and her husband did hunting and odd jobs. Cars, which they carefully pass down through families, enable them to move around for better jobs and housing. When my father in law lost his job, he moved in with his mom and found various jobs in a 60 mile radius. If you look at the places in the U.S. with good transit, the poor there are structurally poor. They can’t just go to where the jobs are—they are stuck going to where the train lines go. It becomes a trap that creates generational poverty.
> Are you saying that it’s faster to get around Malmo on transit than in a car?
It’s true for almost all journeys. Cycling is the fastest in almost all circumstances. Especially if you include parking.
If I need to work to earn a living and working remotely in Europe for an American company were not an option (for some strange reason) I'd rather live in Orlando.
I admit that Europe tends to be a nicer place to live for those who have enough savings that they do not need to work and for those too sick to work.
I don't speak Swedish and I'm perfectly fine living and working here. The level of English speaking in Malmö often exceeds the ability to speak English in places in the UK. Ironically.
Why would you rather live in Orlando?
I presume you've been to both places.
I'm curious whether you work remotely for a non-European organization or are self-employed at the kind of job that can be done anywhere with decent internet connectivity.
I used to work here: https://www.massive.se - Owned by Ubisoft, kinda international, 800 or so employees in Malmö
Then I worked here: https://www.sharkmob.com - Now owned by Tencent, not very international though, not really spidered into Tencent. About 350~ employees in Malmö.
After that I worked here: https://www.rennsport.gg - German company, where it was a remote company but I build an onsite office or 20 persons in Malmö. That was the largest office in the company.
Now I work for a Swedish company.
There's also a bunch of companies like ESS (European Spallation Source)[0] in Lund, Verisure and Axis communications.
[0]: https://ess.eu
>I don't speak Swedish and I'm perfectly fine living and working here. The level of English speaking in Malmö often exceeds the ability to speak English in places in the UK.
That is interesting. I should explain that I edited out the part of my comment about language (because it is not relevant to my point).
I haven't been to Malmo, but I doubt that visiting a place for a short time tells a person much about what it is like to live and work there. I've read hundreds of comments from people who have lived and worked in both the US and Europe. I believe that life in Europe tends to be more orderly and pleasant than life in the US. A good example of "more orderly" is that deaths from automobile accidents are several times higher in the US than they are in most places in Europe -- and not just because Americans spend more time in cars: in the US, deaths per mile of travel in automobiles are several times higher.
>Why would you rather live in Orlando?
Because income is a massive factor in quality of life, and for any level of income, it is significantly easier to earn that level of income in the US than in Europe provided that the person in question is healthy enough to hold a job.
The cycle of car costs, repairs, and impacts of breakdowns for under-privileged people is a pretty serious poverty trap in places that have no other options. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/trump-tariffs-used-car...
Limited mobility from public transit is a much bigger poverty trap. In Oregon, where my in laws are, you can get tons of odd jobs to scrape by within a 60-minute driving radius. Even in a place with great transit, like Tokyo, you’re pretty limited to where you can go on transit in 60 minutes.
That beater car in Dallas is also a financial millstone around its owners neck, and odds are, he's already living hand to mouth, and has zero redundancy for it.
If that weren't so often the case, people wouldn't lose their shit whenever gas goes up 50 cents/gallon.
Isn't America literally the country with longest average and median commutes to work? Like, that was always an American thing - the long commute.
Also, you cant do work in car either. You have to drive and actually pay attention. You cant (or should not) just listen to podcast or loosing yourself in the music. You dont get health benefits of walking a bit or of popping int the store on the way to buy food quickly.
My point here is that if public transport and city are semi reasonably organized, the car has to be actually seriously faster to be worth it.
>America literally the country with longest average and median commutes to work? Like, that was always an American thing - the long commute.
Miles? probably.
Time, lower than a lot of europe IIRC.
The statistics and analysis I have seen were literally about time, not miles. It was literally "americans spend more time commuting".
I hate being a filthy linkposter but I think you're wrong
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
I just google imaged it and all the graphs say about the same thing.
From my understanding this seems to include all forms of transportation (which has value on its own I guess), but it would be more interesting to see car only.
Americans have shorter commutes: https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/1bg82kg/amer...
Driving is much more comfortable than taking transit. You’re by yourself and you always have a seat. Anywhere that has transit good enough where it’s frequent and reliable is also a place where you’re probably standing during your commute.
For lots of America alternatives don't take that much investment. Creating a safe bike network would be relatively cheap and is feasible in large swaths of suburbs.
Due to the aforementioned car dependence: points of interest are further apart from each other than in other cities with solid cycling infrastructure (in Europe for example).
Enormous car-lots several times larger than the buildings that they serve for example, sprawling 6-lane roads that take 20s to clear a junction on a slow moving bicycle, these things contribute to it being infeasible for more poeple.
Connecting the bike lanes is not a problem, though people will fight it tooth and nail because they wan't all infrastructure spending to go to cars... hence, reinforcing the issue, because when all you have is a hammer...
Yes, they are further apart than they need to be, but they still tend to be within relatively short cycling distance. At certain times cycling is even faster than driving due to gridlock traffic, even in suburbs. For example, this very moment, because the main way through town is clogged with parents picking their kids up from school.
I think a majority of the problem is cultural and/or political. I know people who take a longer drive over a shorter bike ride (due to gridlock traffic).
Bikes can reach remarkably far in flat areas if the infrastructure is there. And with a folding bike you only need 1 bus as a range extender to go really far. However lots of money is relying on both those things not happening.
It’s honestly becoming a national subculture. Being a “burnout”. In tech burnout means you’re exhausted on working on things. In America “a burnout” is someone so deeply in debt they don’t even try to really pay it off, they just ignore the debt and spend money on cheap thrills when they can. Obviously not something that you advertise about yourself, but go to any bar in rural south and they know what am talking about.
As bad as the debt situation is in the US there’s not much a collection agency can do to force you to pay relatively petty sums under 100,000 they will just harass you basically.
The Roman proverb goes “The begger laughs in the face of the bandit” so burnouts spread money before it can be taken from them, then turn around and beg for more. A person who’s established this mentality, the exact amount they owe is the least of there problems.
> if you don't properly invest in the maintenance of the thing
For me, it's not the money that's annoying (though of course I'm not pleased by the bills every once in a while). It's the amount of time it takes to keep a car maintained! Seems like just yesterday I took a whole day remote to sit at the mechanics shop for a tire change, but now I have to do the same for an oil change! For this precise reason I end up doing a lot of maintenance late.
You need to find a new mechanic if it is taking them an entire day to replace tires or do an oil change.
Or just do it yourself. At least oil changes can be done entirely oneself with a very small number of non-specialized tools. You don't even need a house with a garage, you can do it in your driveway or even on the street if you only have street parking.
As others have pointed out, tires are somewhat more complicated, but not entirely out of the realm of the home shade tree mechanic, if you're willing to invest in a few specialized tools/fixtures.
Unfortunately, there are some apartment complexes, HOAs, and city ordinances that prohibit people from working on their cars, which means either needing to find a legal place to do your own repairs or paying a mechanic. I’ve lived in apartments my entire adult life thus far, and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds. I have no choice but to either find a friend with a garage (not easy in the Bay Area when most of my friends can’t afford garages) or taking my car to a mechanic and paying Bay Area labor costs.
Those rules are usually intended to prevent people from having a derelict car up on blocks "under repairs" for weeks or months at a time. No one will notice or care if you do a quick oil change.
>legal place
You know you can just break the rules when it comes to petty stuff like that, right? If you're not being unreasonable or thumbing your nose at them they typically don't come after you.
>and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds.
This is a direct result of the clean water act and knock on laws.
The clean water act mandates stormwater management. The solution needs to be maintained in perpetuity. The HOA is the entity saddled with this. There's various engineering calculations that go into pollutant load which impacts the size of the stormwater bullshit engineered ponds you need. In order to make the solution they are forced to build cheaper, the developer puts "no wrenching" (and a bunch of other things) in the initial HOA covenant.
The city ordinances are mostly the same. They're putting that shit in their so that the engineering numbers are better and their stormwater stuff can be cheaper.
That's not to say the snooty jerks don't like those rules for their own sake.
Locally to me, it’s pretty uncommon for any mechanics, tire shops, etc. to give any sort of timeline for any sort of service.
I recently had a 1-hour job done on my car - the only appointment my local mechanic takes is for a specific date - you drop off first thing in the morning, and they call you when they’re done.
I also just called my local tire shop to enquire about mounting/balancing (but not installing) tires - they don’t take appointments for that, but also don’t guarantee any particular speed of service - you drop off your tires, and they call you when they’re done, whether it’s that day or the next.
It's not that it takes all day to do the work. It's that you get to your "appointment" and they really haven't set aside any time for you. You're just put in line like the next walk up guy.
This is my favorite thing about getting an EV; effectively zero maintenance except for tires.
I keep seeing this argument but I think about whats broken in my ice over the years: brakes, control arms, struts, suspension springs. You get a pass on gearbox but as a genuine question, do these usual mechanical problems that have nothing to do with the engine jist not happen on EVs?
Bushings and suspension parts will likely have similar (or possibly worse) wear than an IC based car due to the extra weight. Brakes a bit less possibly since you can use the regenerative braking but this also depends largely on the driver and situation.
*This is an assumption based on my experience with cars in general and doing my own repairs/maintenance not a slam on EVs.
My Model Y had to have its front control arms replaced after 4 years, it was squeaking really loud when turning. That's the only part that needed to be fixed so far, and at $250 it didn't exactly break the bank. There's the other stuff like wiper replacement and rotating/replacing tires which still have to be done. Much better than the regular $500+ annual maintenance with occasional $1000+ repair that my Honda Civic required. And that was a relatively cheap ICE to maintain.
If you look at an evs maintenance schedule it’s basically inspect stuff from time to time until 150k+ miles. Brakes don’t get changed as you almost never use them. Parts might break but not really anything maintenance wise.
I haven't done it myself but isn't a tire change suppose to be pretty easy thing to do, certainly better than sitting the whole day in the shop?
First you have to get big bulky tires delivered to wherever you're going to install them on to your wheel rims. Then you need equipment to remove the old tires from your rims, and install the new ones on the rims. Next you need to balance the tires, then you need to take care of all the TPMS components. After this you need to mount your tires. Forget something? Too bad your car is out of commission til all the above is done.
Usually it involves swapping the new tires onto the rims. It's not easy to do.
Plus balancing the new tires on those rims, and next to nobody has the gear to do that.
When I last priced the equipment it wasn't that bad costwise. In my case though it was only worth it to get rid of the whole "dealing with tire shops" issue. A close friend owns a used car dealership and they bought the mounter and balancer. IIRC...it just needed a 240v line.
I have also lost days waiting for tire shops and alignment...as those are the only 2 things I don't do myself.
A tire machine is life changing in a good way if you have a lot of cars you're responsible for. China is starting to make mid-market ones (simple pneumatic ones that are powered bug geared to home use rather than professional like the ~$1k electric machines) for ~$400ish that I'd take seriously if I was in the market
Once you have a tire machine you'll spend more time at the tire shop (outside business hours, lol) because their trash pile will be your best source for reasonably new used tires. They sell a lot of sets of 4 when 2 would do.
A $50 static balancer will do good enough for new tires in reasonable sizes.
You wanna take used half worn tires and put it on bent rims and make it come out ok, you need a digital balancer to make that not suck.
definitely not easy by yourself, but the whole process (change, then alignment etc) shouldn't take a decent mechanic's shop more than a couple of hours. I've changed tires on my nearly 200k mile car several times now, and it's usually a few days for the tires to be delivered (in america the mechanic will just receive it) and a 2h appt to get the work done. I'm shocked your parent comment mentioned waiting a whole day at the mechanics'.
My friend does this at Costco, and it takes longer purely because of appt mismanagement and backup, the work itself is quick.
It's a real bitch with spoons.
Tire machines from china are getting better and cheaper all the time, but balancers are still expensive.
The tire shop near me (America's Tire) has changed all four tires, with zero advance notice, in one hour.
Being on the bottom rungs is actually a lot cheaper than "HN style" car ownership. Nobody expects your shitbox to be legal, or have compliant papers all the time. You're blue collar so you know people who wrench and trade favors here and there. Boss expects you to be late a few times a month.
There's a "welfare cliff" when you try to get into a "must have reliable transportation" job though
Lower end jobs tend to be unforgiving on not planting your butt in seat at the scheduled time. I find the higher end your job the less BS you are forced to endure. e.g. No drug tests, no doctor's note to justify sick leave. If there's a layoff there's severance. Flex time.
There are some accommodations for poor drivers. Politicians loath to raise fuel tax. This shifts costs of roads from drivers onto general taxpayers. Car insurance limits are the same as in the 1970s. This shifts cost of accidents from poor drivers onto accident victims who are not fully compensated. Emissions testing and safety testing is either not done at all or waived for drivers who claim hardship.
Converting away from cars costs almost nothing compared to continuing cars. The project to put California route 37 above water near the Sonoma-Marin County line is going to cost $10 billion without adding any capacity. That's one tiny little project. And people don't even want to attach a number to the external cost of pollution.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCLACBS consumer loan delinquencies up a lot in the last couple of years, tapered over the last year, low relative to historic norms
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRCCLACBS credit card delinquencies are similar
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRSFRMACBS home loans delinquencies look amazing right now, to the surprise of noone, since everyone is sitting happy having locked in their 3% rates a few years back.
My understanding is that Tricolor went under due to systemic fraud ("The core of the fraud allegations is that Tricolor illegally used the same loan portfolios as collateral for separate credit lines with multiple banks" to the tune of ~$200M)
First Brands also went under due to fraud ("First Brands had relied on billions of dollars in undisclosed debt, primarily from the private credit market, by borrowing against its invoices. This practice, known as factoring, kept the debt off the company's official balance sheet")
Yes, things feel tighter than they did in the years immediately post-Covid because there was a lot of free $ in the system, a lot of debt collections were paused, and Covid went on long enough for people to start treating that as the new normal when that was never going to be the case.
No, I don't see these as canaries for a 2008-esque event.
The scary thing to keep an eye on is commercial office space debt (e.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HPP/) which is likely to cause a cascade of fire sales as 5/10 yr debt obligations come due and how that will have cascading effects on commercial bank loans. That will be a hairy situation, but, fortunately, once it passes, rents in downtown areas will plummet and there will be a huge surge in growth in response to more favorable rents. Right now, commercial rents are locked into untenable rates because the loans are contingent on those rates which is resulting in 30%+ unused commercial space in areas like downtown SF.
> Right now, commercial rents are locked into untenable rates because the loans are contingent on those rates
Let me get this straight.
A landlord cannot lower the rent, because they took out a loan on the property which promised to the lender that the rent is a particular amount?
> which is resulting in 30%+ unused commercial space in areas like downtown SF.
The loan prevents the landlord from lowering the rent, so the landlord realizes rental income of $0 on the property.
Oh, that's just great.
Yeah loan covenants lock you in like that. But banks don’t want to manage or sell big commercial properties. If it gets dicey for property owners, they’ll work out a deal with their bank.
Remember Getty:
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem.
If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
I'm surprised it has taken this long. Everything I thought I knew about economics (and basic finance) has pointed in the direction of imminent pain for consumers, but what I've been hearing is more of a dull ache at most.
I don't want a crisis, and if we avert one I'll happily update my beliefs. But even if the crisis comes I'll have to figure out why it has been so slow.
You’re probably underestimating how much credit is available to people. Having money issues? Keep paying your car while you borrow money from Klarna for your DoorDash chipotle.
Even as someone who barely cooks, I can't fathom the apparent popularity of DoorDash etc. versus the extra cost you have to pay.
I mean they hide it as best they can. Big restaurants like Applebee's you'll see "2 for $28" not priced at $28 so you can guesstimate the squeeze but otherwise you kinda have to go straight to Starbucks or McDonalds using a mobile app to order your "usual" to compare "here's what it looks like if I use DoorDash, here's what it looks like if I go myself," to find that the actual delivery fee is some $20-25 per order. Even worse, I'm pretty sure that they test algorithms to try to selectively lower this for new customers so that in the early days when you're more aware of the cost it seems like a steal.
Of course, you can arrive at the $20 just by thinking, "okay, I need someone to go do an errand for me, they'll have to drive to the restaurant, wait there for 15-20 minutes, and then bring it back... so it'll cost $15 for the hour of their time plus a few bucks of overhead for the platform plus a few bucks of messed-up-my-order insurance..."
Which gets us to 5 years from now when the DoorDash killer comes out, it'll be called Kourier or something starting with a K, and it'll start with trying to give Target a way to call up some extra trained Target employees, but they're cross-trained in packaging orders for K. One person will pick up 10 carefully-packaged K-orders, take them all to the central delivery hub, they'll get sorted into driverless cars that plot through some neighborhood some 10 stops, it'll be marketed as a real Amazon-killer and fly under DoorDash's nose -- InstaCart might balk, but DoorDash won't. Until they reveal some pizza-delivery partnership and suddenly within a year every restaurant has some K-employee working for them, whose job it is to batch orders down to the bikes that come by.
Sure, delivery times for Kourier will be 75, 80 minutes long at first. People won't mind because you pay $4 for delivery instead of $20. And Doordash/Amazon won't die, Amazon will just buy Kourier and DoorDash will focus on more rural locales.
> it'll be called Kourier or something
I'll be disappointed if it isn't like Snow Crash (1992):
> The Deliverator, in his distracted state, has allowed himself to get pooned. As in harpooned. It is a big round padded electromagnet on the end of an arachnofiber cable. It has just thunked onto the back of the Deliverator's car, and stuck. Ten feet behind him, the owner of this cursed device is surfing, taking him for a ride, skateboarding along like a water skier behind a boat.
> In the rearview, flashes of orange and blue. The parasite is not just a punk out having a good time. It is a businessman making money. The orange and blue coverall, bulging all over with sintered armorgel padding, is the uniform of a Kourier. A Kourier from RadiKS, Radikal Kourier Systems. Like a bicycle messenger, but a hundred times more irritating because they don't pedal under their own power -- they just latch on and slow you down.
My son wanted to DoorDash a burrito from chipotle. I told him to look at the final price and compare it to chipotles website.
The $8 burrito is listed on doordash’s website for $11 + a delivery fee they were waiving for a first order (not sure what it would have been).
Delivery fees vary from $4-10, plus tip.
And while tipping is technically optional, it's de facto required. The driver will see the total pay for a delivery before they accept it, and if it's too low, they'll reject it, and DoorDash will offer the delivery to another driver. If you don't tip, then your delivery will be rejected until it reaches some driver that's gotten desperate. By that time, your food will likely have been already made and sitting and waiting for 30 minutes.
When the popular running theme of complaints is "it's impossible to do X because poor people all work 168 hours a week minimum", it's easy to excuse wasting your money to save time.
It's a game of musical chairs. Very fun until the music stops!
It took long because during the last Trump era, lenders figured out a neat trick - extend the loan terms to 7 years instead of the conventional 5. That, and the low interest rates hooked people. This exaggerated during the pandemic with people taking insane $1000/month loans.
Trump comes back, downturn comes back to main street, and voila - loans running naked.
One thing the article doesn't mention is deportees. The administration always says illegal immigrants but when you look the vast majority that are being deported are documented people here under some allowed process, they just haven't been granted a green card yet. Documented immigrants have work permits, social security cards, all the thing to find housing, get jobs, engage in banking etc...
When they're picked up and going to be deported, do you think they're going to care about their car loan, home mortgage or credit card debt? Not even a little bit. I had a friend here awaiting asylum for 7 years. She was picked up by ICE, sat for 3 months in detention, finally just agreed to leave because that's was long enough to be evicted by her apartment (and get significant fees for it) be defaulted on her credit cards, and on her car loan.
Who pays for all that debt, in excess of $20,000 for everything. She never will, she goes to another country, finds a decent paying job because she has years of experience in the US and now speaks English. All very valuable skills to a lot of employers in central and south America.
Expect to see a lot more loans being defaulted on. We were lied to about the number of illegals. Now we're going to see the effect of deporting people who were working, participating in the economy, and happy to be here. All because the lies saying they were illegal.
There was a meme (most likely fake) post on reddit from an H1b holder who took out as many lines of credit as they could and left after the whole fee debacle. But there's that dark kernel of truth inside: if your job prospects in the country are wrecked, what's stopping people from cashing in on the way out?
>One thing the article doesn't mention is deportees. The administration always says illegal immigrants but when you look the vast majority that are being deported are documented people here under some allowed process, they just haven't been granted a green card yet.
Documented != legal, one can be documented and an illegal immigrant. If you have a deportation order with a final date in the past, you are a documented illegal immigrant. If you're unlawfully in the US due to overstaying your visa, you are a documented illegal immigrant. Practically every case in the past year has proven out to be the person deported was illegal.
>Documented immigrants have work permits, social security cards, all the thing to find housing, get jobs, engage in banking etc...
Yet they can still be illegal immigrants.
>do you think they're going to care about their car loan, home mortgage or credit card debt?
The vast majority of illegal immigrants being deported have none of those things. All cash.
>Who pays for all that debt, in excess of $20,000 for everything. She never will, she goes to another country
Car gets repossessed, house gets foreclosed. The majority have miniscule or nonexistent credit card debt. Less than a rounding error for the economy as a whole.
Their deportation will increase housing supply, which reduces rent and home prices though!
>We were lied to about the number of illegals. ... All because the lies saying they were illegal.
No we weren't. They are illegal.
You are factually incorrect. Documented means that they are legally allowed to be in the country which is why they have received work permits and that they have received social security numbers. They have a legal status which is why they are documented as being here. To say that they dealt in all cash is a factual lie. Where are you getting your data. I'm getting my data first hand from someone who was picked up and also had first hand accounts of hundreds of people in detention. All with work permits all with social security cards all who had legal jobs at the time of their detention. All of them were engaging in the normal commerce of a USA citizen which is to have a debt load and a credit rating. Do you think they had cash to pay for those vehicles? Do you think they had cash to pay for those houses? Do you think apartments don't run credit ratings? You are absolutely foolish to think that this is some massive 30 million people with a cash based underground. Modern banking doesn't work that way, almost no jobs pay that way. No jobs that you're going to get with a work permit and a social security card which is the vast majority of jobs. You think these people just pick your lettuce in the field. That's absolutely insane you really need to educate yourself because you have believed the lies that were told.
The law does not consider them illegal aliens. ICE does not classify them as illegal aliens. Only red-headed political ideologues that are looking for a boogeyman consider them illegal aliens.
You can say that it is a miniscule number of them having credit and debt but you need some evidence to back up your claims. Increasing housing supply at the cost of a greater burden for everyone else isn't a good way to do it. Because these were functioning taxpayer members of society. Then they became burdens to society because they were housed in detention facilities at an extraordinary cost along with the money lost for the proper eviction procedures and debt recovery procedures and everything else.
It is absolutely foolish to take people who were following the legal process and we're legally documented as being here putting them into tension centers causing them to default on their mortgages or their leases. Causing them to default on their car loans and their credit card debt. For you to act like it's a good thing is absolutely insane.
Because you believed the lies that these were illegal criminals that weren't allowed to be here. Go and read the lies of the news media. That's how it was presented. It only takes a small bit of logic to say if they were actually criminals that were not allowed to be here then they wouldn't know where they are. Because there would be no documentation. The fact that they could go get them so quickly was because they were allowed to be here and they were arbitrarily revoking parole statuses and other statuses of people that were granted permission to be here following the processes laid out in the law.
Now you will bear the financial burden for it. Because fools like you think that they were criminal illegal aliens. When they were not they were legal aliens. I highly suggest you go and review the actual many immigration statuses that are granted. Because there are many statuses where you are legally allowed to be in this country as an alien without being granted a visa. Once you have reviewed those I will await your apology.
> We were lied to about the number of illegals.
Remember this the next time someone starts trying to shit-stir about an invisible group of people here.
This has more numbers:
https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/
The main pattern is that people are paying a lot for cars. Looks like a lot of 6 year+ loans in the new market.
Imagine having a credit score of 300 and a $542/mo loan payment on a used car. Cursed. Americans need buses more than ever.
I live in a city with lots of buses, they are great. The problem is that they are neuropsychiatric units on wheels, there is always some crazy person being clinically crazy (like talking to imaginary friends), so that makes the whole ride something you don't want to experience often if possible.
We take the bus all of the time here in DC. I’ve literally never once encountered someone like that.
I’ve been panhandled a couple of times (in as many decades) and there’ve been a few people yelling at each other, but they left everyone alone.
On the driving front, though, I’ve had a bunch of people with anger management issues threaten to kill me and the only times in my adult life that I’ve credibly been threatened with a fistfight were by people driving who resented being expected to stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk. The bus crowd is a lot more chill.
> We take the bus all of the time here in DC.
Right, now try the same in Seattle and take a bus going to 3rd avenue in Downtown. I've also tried it in SF, it's not nice.
Eh, that discourse is usually being advanced by people who never ride the bus, don't intend to start riding it, and have a personal interest in selling you a car. In real transit preference surveys, and historical outcomes, it is clear that people would ride a bus that goes to their destinations, comes often and reliably, and is reasonably priced, without regard to how many mental cases are aboard. So if a transit agency faces a choice of spending limited resources on policing the inside of the vehicle for lunatics, or adding a bus to the schedule, they should always choose the latter.
“it is clear that people would ride a bus that goes to their destinations, comes often and reliably, and is reasonably priced, without regard to how many mental cases are aboard”
If you believe this, it would be cause to doubt your sanity.
I'm from a 3rd world country who rode the bus everyday to everywhere.
Me and my wife don't feel safe riding the bus in the West Coast of the USA.
Does anyone else hate busses, and the only response you ever get after mentioning this is "NUH UH BUSSES CAN BE GREAT"?
A bus will pretty much always be inferior to a car. Mathematically impossible to run on time. It never gets you where you want to go, just kinda close usually. If one doesn't show up, there is no real feedback without an extensive background metadata system. Never as clean as your own car (unless you're one of those carbage-loving people I suppose, but then you're just going to litter on the bus anyways). Obnoxious, loud, smelly, or crazy people you have to deal with.
I'll never understand the crowd so desperate to have them, but I'll still support the cause if it cleans up the highways for me I guess.
> A bus will pretty much always be inferior to a car.
I never have to clean a bus, or put gas in it, or change its oil. I don't even have to drive it.
I don't have to dedicate a big portion of my property to storing it, just to pay to park it somewhere else when I go out. I'll never get a ticket for leaving it in the wrong place, and I'll never have to go to court because I used it wrong.
I don't have to worry about it getting stolen, or crashed into. I don't have to worry about being unable to afford the insurance or registration. I don't have any wealth tied up in it, so its deprecation doesn't matter.
Having to walk a few minutes at the start and end of my journey is a small price to pay for such convenience.
And if I ever do need one, I can rent one for less than the average American's monthly payment. In fact, I can rent the exact one I need that day, which might be a pickup today but a minivan tomorrow.
Also:
- Not having to perform the repetitive, mind-numbingly-dull-yet-somehow-simultaneously-stressful cognitive task of driving.
- Instead, having the freedom to engage in more relaxing, productive or creative pursuits in this era of smartphones; do work, watch videos, read books, sleep, or even just look out the window.
- Never having to deal with traffic jams. Or road rage.
- Getting a chance to walk places for free instead of paying to do the same thing on a treadmill in a gym.
> I'll never have to go to court because I used it wrong.
Technically, it's possible to be required to go to court, for some value of "used it wrong".
Or so I'm told.
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Just looking at Google Maps, if I wanted to get to the city centre right now:
- Car: 22 minutes (and, er, park... somewhere? Who knows)
- Walk: 42 minutes
- Bike: 14 minutes
- Bus: 17 minutes (including 3 minutes walk)
- Train: 20 minutes (including 10 minutes walk)
Buses work in some places.
(Granted, this is traffic-dependent and the train would def beat it at rush hour in my particular case, particularly as Google Maps' time for walking is very conservative.)
I could fairly handily afford a car, but for my lifestyle, where I like, there just doesn't seem to be any real _point_.
You have severe misanthropy you need to work out in therapy. The possibility of encountering elderly people or children on your commute should not invoke this kind of reaction and it's weird that's the first place your mind went.
The answer is no, I do not mind people coming and going on the bus because I am a normal human. Not that your example is realistic anyway, I can't think of a time in the last few years any passenger has delayed my bus for 10 minutes (drivers, on the other hand...).
FWIW "some mediocre experience every single day" could just as easily describe sitting in traffic. At least on the bus I can play with my phone.
You find these arguments convincing because you're starting from "I hate the bus" and working backwards. That's not an honest way to have a conversation.
Gotta love these armchair psychologists who have no clue what they’re talking about. You made a whole psychological profile because I… came up with an example. Physically painful to have to converse in scenarios like this.
The fact that you think “transportation for people who explicitly cannot drive” is not a major draw of public transit, you’re crazy.
But of course, when you start from “I love the bus” and work backwards, I guess you weren’t interested in arguing honestly from the beginning, right?
I have never seen a bus staying at stop for 10 min for random reason.
You are making up inconveniences that dont exist.
Dublin is currently making changes to traffic flow to prioritise buses, with the result that some buses now go far faster than they used to. But because everything is in flux, and Dublin Bus hates updating timetables at the best of times, it is now somewhat common for a too-fast bus to stop for a few minutes to get back on schedule (complete with recorded message to that effect). It'll pass, but it is, for now, a thing.
(They've tweaked it now, but for a few months the bus I usually use to get from home to the city centre did this on about 30% of journeys.)
If you’ve never seen it, it just doesn’t exist. My mistake.
It just isnt a thing, really.
TIL old people don't exist and the problems every bus on the planet faces are actually just fake
In most places I've lived, busses are for poor people. Because anyone else will pay whatever it takes to get a car and avoid something like a _three hour_ round trip for something 10 miles away. I'm not kidding; my work commute is 10 miles each way, in a city of way more than 1M, and it's 1.5 hours total for me to get to work on time.
I've lived in one place where they were great. Dense urban environments can do that, though. So nuh us busses can be great (the trains were even better), but it seems like the US has zero actual drive to make public transit not crap.
I've lived in a couple places with public transit way faster and more efficient than cars.
But because it's public, people can't be easily kicked off. Once I was caught between a knife fight; another time a schizophrenic person started to aggressively trap me in the corner while going on an increasing paranoid tirade.
Not long after that I bought a bicycle.
A bicycle is pretty much always going to beat a bus over reasonable distances, on performance alone, not even counting the crazy people.
Always amused by HN on buses. It seems that the median HN is basically okay with trains, but is convinced that if they ever set foot on a bus they will immediately be stabbed by 47 drug addicts, and then their soul consigned to Bus Hell. It's kind of comically hyperbolic.
I wonder where the dividing line is. Are HNs afraid of trams? Very Light Rail systems? Trambuses? Trolleybuses? BRTs? Railbuses? Someone should do a survey.
(Though thinking about it further, probably _should_ be afraid of railbuses, which are a bus chassis on rails; kind of amazing they were ever allowed really. Bizarrely, some were actually still in use in the UK til 2021 or so. Even more shockingly, there don't seem to have been many/any documented fatal incidents; one of the UK railbuses was destroyed more or less completely in a crash, but it was empty at the time.)
Nobody denies that if we all chip in to build a door-to-door freeway and free parking for you it will be cool for you. The question is whether we have better things to do with our money.
Than spending it upending the entire transportation infrastructure when we have much more pressing problems? Then I agree.
If you think buying a whole bunch of busses is going to solve some major problem... I have a bridge to add to your purchase.
>>It never gets you where you want to go.
As well as the car. Unless you destination is a parking lot.
Also worth noting the average new car is now $50k and the average new car loan is $40k+
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/10/17/50000-new...
Starting to find out the risks of a car-centric society in a slow-burn economic crisis.
The average has just gone past $50l but it is not clear it will stay there. There are a few things that drove it up recently.
One contributor was a surge in EV sales to beat the expiration of the tax credits. EVs on average cost more than non-EVs so that pushed the average up. EVs were almost 12% of September sales with an average price of $58k.
There are plenty of EVs a lot lower that than that, so why was the average EV so high? That brings is to another contribution: in general it was upper-end buyers who currently dominate the market (the potential lower end buyers are probably too worried about the economy and maybe the likely big increases in health insurance for 2026 to buy a car now). Upper end buyers tend to go for the more luxurious cars, whether they are buying an ICE or EV.
Remember though, just because the average is about $50k doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of good new cars for a lot less. A 2026 Toyota Corolla has a base MSRP of $22 725. For $24 575 you can get the hybrid which increases the MPG from 32 city/41 highway to 53 city/46 highway.
A lot of that is that Americans are buying trucks, not cars. It’s easy to stay under $30k with a sedan, but a sizable group of people think they need the image of driving a full-sized pickup truck to the office and each 7 year loan on an $80k truck is going to drive the average up, not to mention leaving the buyer more cash-strapped due to the higher operating costs.
Yeah the average is high, that means there are cars cheaper than that. People are spending big because they either are doing no researchand getting suckered, or they are buying nicer cars for vanity reasons.
Automakers realized during the pandemic they could increase prices and reduce production and come out ahead. Import tariffs means you are, as a consumer, held captive by a domestic market to extract from you for your potentially non discretionary personal transportation needs. If you must have a car, the price is the price.
This has slowly been changing as of recently, but now tariffs are eating into automaker balance sheets to the tune of ~$30B, which will have to come from somewhere in transaction volume.
Or it's the only thing available.
A few years ago my car was totaled by an uninsured illegal in a hit and run, and I was forced to get another one (bought used). This was back when the bubble was even worse, and since I lived on dirt roads, I needed a 4x4. Literally the only thing I could find not clapped out were luxury models, because rich people were about the only people at the time dumping cars that weren't completely clapped out.
No, the average is high because we've lost a lot of our cheap 'new' cars.
10 years ago you could go onto a lot and buy a brand new Dodge Dart for around $17,000.
Today, the cheapest Dodge is a Hornet SUV/CUV for $31,000+; the cheapest Jeep is $27,000.
We just don't have new car choices under $20k -- we're all forced into extremely high loans for 'new', or extremely screwed rates for 'used'.
> 10 years ago you could go onto a lot and buy a brand new Dodge Dart for around $17,000.
$17k 10 years ago is $23k today. That's under the MSRP of a 2026 Toyota Corolla.
In constant dollars car prices for comparable trim levels of similar styles of car have actually been have been pretty steady for the last 40 years or so. The average car is a lot more expensive now in constant dollars because the mix of cars bought has shifted significantly toward larger and more luxurious cars.
For example when I was looking for a new car earlier this year I looked at the Honda Civic. When I compared the price to my last Civic, which I bought in 1989, it was about the same after correcting for inflation since 1989. I also looked at the CR-V, and when comparing to my 2006 CR-V today's CR-V after correction for inflation since 2006 is actually about 5-10% cheaper.
Because people buy them.
Americans are really dumb and do next to no research on most purchases. I know several people who think that's a waste of time. The best that a lot of folks can do is a YouTube video.
Throw money at the problem. Learn nothing. Complain when things go bad.
That's what a ton of Americans do now and it's wild seeing it as often as I do. There was recently that Ars article that looked at a study showing how bad anti-intellectualism in this country has become. Being dumb is now a sort of prideful thing for a lot of Americans.
It's real weird.
The average has gone up because we have fewer cheap cars than ever
Average (presumably) mean car price is not useful when discussing affordability.
There are very reliable, brand new vehicles for $30k. The extra amount is luxury.
of course it is useful, there are reliable cars for $30k but most people are buying more expensive cars thus pulling the average up
average car loan amount and loan duration are also up
I once clicked on a YT video about irresponsible debts, apparently it's a popular genre there, don't do it or you'll get a flood of these for a few weeks minimum. The interesting note I saw there was that apparently in USA car credits are now reaching into 7 and 8 years length (from typical maximum of 5 or so) and their rates are reaching well into 20% or higher. And that's not on a housing, that's on depreciating expensive cars. Another new idea for me was the fact that people with car debt, are doing "trade-in" of sorts, giving up old unpaid car for a newer better one, with an even bigger total debt. That was really eye opening stuff.
> "Distress in auto lending broadly is often seen as a bellwether to changing circumstances in the US economy, because Americans particularly in the lower-income brackets tend to put their highest priority in auto payments," said Brett House...
Or, put another way, when the bills come in, people make their car payments first, because they have to get to work. So either there are other bills people aren't paying, or people aren't going to work. Both seem bad. One purported cause of increased auto loan defaults is that people are having to make student loan payments again, although that would suggest they aren't prioritizing the auto payments.
This goes way beyond the high price of cars or people taking out loans with bad terms.
Americans are struggling all over. Rent is skyrocketing. Inflation is applying massive pressure on regular expenses. Household debt is at an all time high. People all over the country are struggling to keep their utilities connected as energy prices soar. Foreclosures are surging. Individual chapter 7 bankruptcy filings are up 15% from last year too. It's really no wonder repossessions are spiking too.
Economically, things look pretty bleak for a huge percentage of Americans and I'm not seeing much to convince me that they're going to get better any time soon.
And yet Americans are door dashing more than ever and financing everything imaginable.
Not saying citizens deserve this but we eagerly gobble up every excuse possible and then complain that our lifestyles aren't sustainable.
The typical American lifestyle is based around excess. It's no surprise that a nation who spends 3x more on unnecessary garbage than any other nation is struggling financially as climate change makes that excess more expensive.
We do this to ourselves with our pride/ego fixation and our endless excuses for why someone else should fix things or someone else is responsible for it.
We don't vote. We don't think critically. We don't do the hard work to benefit our society long term. We buy into every possible excuse.
I think it has more to do with stagnating wages which haven't kept up with inflation (or for that matter productivity) than it does with irresponsible spending. The growing number of people who can barely keep the lights on aren't spending all their income on door dash. They're cutting back on groceries, going to food banks (who have seen record demand) and being forced to resort to Buy Now Pay Later loans for regular groceries (14% more than they were last year https://www.cbsnews.com/news/buy-now-pay-later-bnpl-loans-gr...)
Related: U.S. Consumers Are Collapsing: Cars, Credit, & the Chaos Ahead | The Weekly Wrap - Steve Eisman (Steve Carell’s character from The Big Short) interviews Lakshmi Ganapathi. Uploaded 2025-10-03.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd7akdDtPXA
Funny how a lot was going really well thanks to the last administration. Full employment, hot economy, and administration going after the billionaires. Wow...so much has changed in a year. We piss off the world, we implement tariffs hapharzardly, car and car prices soar and the rich get richer. Brace yourself....
I wonder ... who are they gonna send the repossessed cars to? I think old models of operation are breaking down.
They're typically sold at auction to dealers and individuals. If there's a flood of them, that means that they'll cost less at auction and the prices in the used car market may start coming back down from the crazy heights they've been at.
Doesn’t really matter. The borrower is still on the hook for the balance after sale.
The borrower didn't have the money to pay. Being "on the hook" doesn't mean much if you simply don't have any money.
It's a mini sub-prime in the making.
Depends on who is operating higher up in value ladder probably ends up in auctions by lenders. But lower cases it is revolving system. Where the seller takes vehicle back and sells it again. Sometimes multiple times...
Where do these cars get sold? Sounds like it will be a good time to buy a new-ish used car soon.
> almost two decades after problems in the sub-prime mortgage lending market
Exceedingly dishonest. It was problems in the CDO market.
> "When you see one cockroach, there are probably more,” Jamie Dimon,
Exceedingly ironic.
Maybe now is finally the time to short CVNA.
You think so? Owner financed car loans and repossessions are incredibly profitable, typically the value of the car 3-4 times over. Or so I’ve been told by someone in that business.
Nice knowing you.