Why is everything so expensive?

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Between student loans, health insurance, car insurance, car payments, rent, phone, groceries, and other expenses, it all adds up. You have to make pretty good money in order to afford the things that you need in order to survive. A lot of people have to work more than one job in order to pay for all of these things. What has happened to the economy and the country that we have become slaves to corporations? Why can't working one job be enough to pay your bills? Why have corporations become so greedy? I don't recall my grandparents or even my parents having to deal with a high cost of living when they were young. Back in the olden days you could get a job right out of high school in a factory and retire from that job. Now, pretty much every employer requires you to have a college degree and even that isn't enough to help you get ahead.

Yeah, everything has gotten too expensive. Just the other day I had to pony up over $1500 for routine maintenance on my Mercedes, and didn't have enough cash-on-hand afterward to pay for the champagne brunch at the club. Lucky for me I was able to put it on my card and write it off as a business expense.

You got the wrong Benz.


Anyway in all seriousness it is ridiculous. Our current MO presumes that nobody needs a living wage or even sleep.

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"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
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-Gem Tos

Yes, this has been very noticeable here in the UK over the last decade or so. It's been particularly evident in the cost of basic public services, such as trains and buses, also things like broadband and phone contracts. Another thing is visitor attractions - £15 per person entry fee to a historic building or its grounds, £30+ for an amusement park, £12 for a cinema ticket, things which would have cost between a half and a quarter of this at the turn of the Millennium. That's before we even consider house prices, which have more than quadrupled over the last two decades, and a lot more than that in places like London.

Oddly enough, the official inflation figures will tell you that prices have only risen by an average of a couple of percentage points per annum over this period. These fiddled figures are the result of attempts by governments, with the collusion of economists and statisticians, to keep interest rates at rock bottom levels, supposedly to boost the economy, but it's all backfiring as wages fail to keep up with price rises in the real world, and people's standard of living plummets (while their debt increases).

Different reasons in different locations, IMO.

In general, capitalist greed has concentrated wealth into a few hands and everyone else is a working class debt slave.

Here in Vancouver, it's largely because money laundering is our single largest industry.. and if you're not making money as part of the VanRe cartel, you're getting poorer and poorer by the moment. Wages & salaries haven't really changed at all here in 40 years (seriously) & the City of Vancouver even bragged about this in their bid for Amazon's HQ2 when they pointed out that Amazon could pay tech workers $65K CDN vs $100K USD elsewhere.. meanwhile, the average home price is now $1.277M while the average income in BC is $53K gross. Now SO MANY people here have 2nd jobs, side hustles or gigs etc and are working around the clock just to make it month to month. It's pretty insane. I've been working 2 jobs, but I can't command a high enough wage to get ahead further than I am atm until I build my skill set so I've been contemplating taking on a 3rd part time job just for a little breathing room until I can get a couple raises. Fortunately I'm able to handle working nearly double full time hours when I have to, and at one point I logged 98h on the clock for a 2 week pay period - that's unsustainable in the long run, though, as it's physically exhausting. I'll do whatever it takes to make it, stay here, and achieve my goals of being able to afford to go back to University for a long time. The insane grind will be only temporary.. trading all my time for money to just barely get ahead is a temporary pain for the long term gain of being able to Really get ahead by doing that once I can consistently command a significantly higher wage. Short term pain, long term gain. But yeah, life is VERY expensive.. housing costs are through the roof, fuel costs are the highest in North America, even groceries are getting expensive when the stores that sell them are sitting on real estate now valued in the 10's of Millions of dollars. Money laundering kleptocrat class jerks! Oh well; it's only time & money.. annnnnd, I get to be Here.

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No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

It's awful in the UK. You've basically got to be rich to live a standard sort of life. I know a few people who work in stressful jobs way over 40 hours a week, and they barely have much time to themselves and only live in a small house or apartment, and all their wages go on rent, bills and tax, and they don't have hardly any money left over to treat themselves. And then the government wants to keep raising the retirement age too. I mean, life is too precious to be spending it working for the most part of your life like that. Bills and rent shouldn't be that expensive. It's just greed. They could lower the cost of standard living, and more people can survive on a 4 or 5 day week and still have money to themselves. Honest, hard-working citizens should be rewarded.
The NHS is a good thing...for now. But the sh***y conservatives seem to want to destroy the NHS and instead spend all our money away on foreign aid. I'm sorry but the NHS could be saved if the government actually spent our taxes on their own people.
Vet bills are diabolical. Vets know how to use pet-owner's conscience to rake in their money by the "find thousands of pounds or your pet will die" stuff. Most people love to have a pet and I think vet bills should be far more affordable. They'll still make good money, without the heartache they cause animal-lovers.

Still, I don't know how the hell so many people afford a car, as the streets are just congested with millions of cars most times of the day.

this world of human users of other humans, is a hell world.

Have you heard of the gold standard?

The purchasing power of gold is at a constant. (This has artificially been changed in the past through corrupt means but they always put it back as being a constant). This means that if I have a bar of gold and buy something with it like a nice Morgan car (Let us assume the car and the gold have the same value, and I have chosen a traditional Morgan because this model (Can't remember model name) has stayed the same design for years and due to demand it is likely to stay the same as people love it as it is).
Now lets assume I bought two Morgan cars today and one cost a bar of gold and the other cost (Lets think of a figure... No idea how much they cost!) 50,000 pounds (Or whatever currency one wants to use).
Now lets say I love these cars so much I have worn them out some 30 years later so I decide to buy another two Morgan cars to the exact same description as they are still made the same with no alterations.
I buy the two new replacement cars the same way as I did before. The first I buy in gold. It costs me the same bar of gold that it did before, but when I buy the other Morgan car in cash, it now costs me 100,000 pounds because the purchasing power of the monetry currency has halved. This is called "Inflation".

Now here in the UK and I hear in the USA along with the EU too, something very odd is going on. The inflation rates are being disguised. They are being hidden, because they are said to be at an all time low so if one has money in the bank in a savings account one is going to get very little in return, if anything,though it seems a good idea to get a mortgage (Caution!! ! There is a sting. Always look for a long term fixed rate mortgage!).
What is going on?

Firstly something I will say. Think of building bicycle wheels. To those who have done so, it is about balance. Alter the adjustment of one spoke where one is and the opposite spoke on the other side of the wheel also alters and the key to building or truing wheels is to know this and to be clever enough to use wheel building principles in place to counter this effect and thus keep this balance so the area where one is truinng does not effect other areas of the wheel unless one wants them to so one will alter ones truing methods accordingly.
I realized that the monetary systems of the world are like that. If one country is collapsing, another somewhere else will be thriving as the balnce is maintained as the overall monetary wealth of the world does not change much in the same way that a bicycle wheel can only take so much tension shared between its spokes. Too much and one risks the wheel spokes snapping, or the nipples pulling clean through the rim as the rim gives up under the load. Too little and the wheel collapses as it can't support itself under load. It has a balance to be had in which an experienced wheelbuilder will tell you. (Is why I think modern lightweight wheels on racing bikes are a bad design and also why I do not like disc brakes as they play havoc on the stresses and strains exerted on the spokes and yet they rarely compensate by altering the strengths of the spokes or by adding more spokes to compensate...But that is another subject and is my own personal oppinion after building and truing many bicycle wheels over the years).
Now the worlds economies I view like bicycle wheels and it is why I see the patterns that something odd is going on. The economies around the world are collapsing at the same time. Very unusial and odd UNLESS it has been planned this way, and if it has been planned, then where is all the wealth actually going?
Who is undoing all the "Spokes" and why?

Consider this. Your governments are the wheel rim. The wheel is being battered by the market forces as economies go up and down. Your government will need to alter its spoke tension accordingly to keep its rim in balance with the rest of the world.

What DeepHour said about the inflation rates are being hidden from us... It is a bit like the inflation rates are skyrocketing and so the spokes are tightening massively, and yet the government has let off all its tension to compensate even rhough the other spokes are doing the opposite so the tension of the whel remains too high? Or is it a case that the governments and their banks are hiding this tension....

But lets add another element into the equasion. Quantitive easing. What is it?
Think of ones money system being in balance. Think of the perfect balance where one only introduces an extra pound to cater for someone else loosing a pound down a drain somewhere. There is the exact right amount of money for those who use it.
Now lets say the natural lost money is not replaced. One will get a situation where someone somewhere will ever be able to earn enough money to pay someone else as the shortage of money will mean there is not enough to go around. Now this will mean that one has a tight strong currency, but too tight and the spokes will snap and the wheel may suddenly collapse. The spoke that snaps is like money lost to everyone being owed if someone goes bankrupt.
But lets say that quantitive easing is added. We are adding money from no where. Where in a natural system we would be trying to replace any snapped spokes... But in this case we are adding spokes that have no holes to fit into while at the same time other spokes are snapping... But instead of carefully adjusting interest rates we add more spokes to make everything look good, but the wheel itself is about to collapse because the spokes added are not added into the wheel but thrown on top of the wheel...

Ok. Another analagy. There is 10,000 in a countries economy which is the right figure to balance. One adds out of thin air another 10,000. This means the people of that economy now have to earn double the amount of money to survive if wages have not doubled.... But if wages do double the te reson for adding themoney into the economy has become pointless so we add more... Every time we add money that has not been earned, our ecomomy is collapsing because if we decide to steady ourselves to buy gold (Which is a constant value) we have to spend double our hard earned money to buy the same gold bar that we did at half the amount we would have bought it before...
Collapsed countries are where one takes wheelbarrows of cash in to pay for a loaf of bread as hyper inflation sets in and inflation as I mentioned is the measurement of speed of a currencies collapse. Quantitive wasing hides and delays this rate but it is a bit like me delaying a shutdown. I can temporarily delay it, but the longer I delay it the harder it hits when I get it! So the more quantitve easing we do, the bigger the collapse will be!

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Two other considerations I will mention which effect the monetary health of ones country. The first is corruption. The second is where peoples standards are raized in a country, but their wages are not. Raizing standards is not always a good thing. It pushes people below the poverty lie where before they were on the line or above it. Raizing standards is raizing the poverty line bar. Instead we need to prosper rhe whole country so the industries are thriving so they can then get good jobs and prosper so they can step over the poverty line as raizing the poverty line by declaring a higher standard will only push more peolle below that shandard and in turn make them feel second class where they give up hope of even trying to pick themselves up. Wealthy people don't understand this. They just keep trying to raize that bar by adding new laws ad rules which fewer and fewer people can keep to. Example "As (In their view) home made tin shack houses are considered to be unliveable in (Ok.. Fair enough for the reasoning here) they pass laws that no one is allowed to build or live in them. This makes those who earn very little homeless! It makes things WORSE for rhem and not better. Provide well paid jobs and train them for those jobs and you get prosperity.

Here is something vitally important to learn. A country needs taxes to sustain a system to make and help it function at whatever level it is in.
People need to earn money in private jobs (In other words government jobs do not earn into the system because paying taxes to rhe one you just earnt it from has no financial gain into the system as it is actually cheaper for you to ave a paycut to the amount of the taxes one would have paid, so the system needs less staff to process ones taxes, rather then paying taxes!)
A countries employment industry outside of the governments running of it.. In other words, the taxes raised that are of value... can be split into three "Types" of industry.

Primary.

Secondary.

Tertiary.

Primary industries are things like farming and mining. This is the industry that obtais the raw materials that run the other two industry types. Without these industries in place the countries economy will eventually collapse so it is VITAL to look after these industries because these alone are the countries only means of gaining wealth.

Secondary industries are the ones which take the raw products the primary industries have made, and convert them into an useable form. These industries may need a few processes to do this. Example, iron ore and coal are needed from the primary industries to make steel. Without steel, one can't make other things like cars. Oil from the primary industries can be turned into plastic in the first stage of a secondary industry and will need a second stage of a further secondary industry to turn the plastic into an useable product. Many other examples. Without these secondary industries one can't make goods ad items to sell.

Tertiary industries are the ones who sell the goods to the customers. Very neccessary as without a way to sell products there is little point of making them in the first place.
However, without the primary and secondary industries, a country will eventually collapse and here is why. One is not producing an increase. Effectively a countries wealth comes from taxing an increase. All other taxes are inward taxes. What I mean by this is onss economy without the first two industries will collapse because one has not earned anything as a country. One has bought in because one has no primary and secondary industries and so as a country one has not gained any wealth and has taxed its own people with no means for the people to produce.. So one has in effect reduced the collective wealth of its people.
Despite how things look in the world today, if I had to predict the worlds future superpowers based on these principles that have to be India and China. Why? Because they value and protect their primary and tertiary industries! It is simple! They have no choice but to prosper! Thsy are making things!

Yes, there is real inflation. But on the other hand, we have so many different goods than what our grandparents had. Many of these are marvels. When my wife was young, they didn't have electricity or running water. They had to throw a bucket down a well to retrieve water. I think my wife was a teenager before they finally got running water. In order to survive in the old days, one had to work really, really hard to make ends meet. We have a lot more spare time in general than our ancestors.

There are two flip sides to a coin here. These are earning and spending. So the focus here is how little the average person earns. But the flip side is how do you spend efficiently what you earn. So the opposite side of the equation is spending money wisely.

Housing may be expensive but the price of housing is determined by where you live. If you live in a big city, housing is generally out of sight. But many times in the countryside, housing is orders of magnitude less expensive. A house that might go for a half a million dollars in California, might sell for fifty thousand dollars where I live.

I am a good bargain shopper. When I buy new clothes, I generally pay around 25% or the retail price. I am always aware of bargains. I make my dollar stretch further.

Around 1814 (thats when constitution was written fyi) up in northern parts of Norway people were starving to death due to trading block , they had to eat sea weed to survive....so no , the good old days werent so good

I asked my mother if I could get the Nintendo Switch and Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Christmas. She said she'll me the NS Lite because the regular NS is like 700 dollars! And the game is around 80 dollars.

Video game cost way too much money in Canada. I remember when my brother and I had the Sega Genesis and my mother would order us games from the States where they were cheaper apparently.

Everything just keeps getting more and more expensive, and pretty soon only filthy rich people will be able to afford anything.

Prices have gone up but our wages have no kept up. I found out at my work, they will pay people $15 an hour even after they had been working there for 10 years or 20 years. So I guess my wages will not go up any higher unless our union fights for a raise for us.

I also find old game prices have gone up again because of game collectors so it makes the games more valuable. It's supply and demand. Mario, Sonic, Kirby, Donkey Koing, Zelda, all these will cost more than generic games and other games with other characters in them like Nick jr characters.

Rent has sky rocketed here in my area so we have been having homeless problems since around 2013 when rents went up. Now we have been getting more homeless people because of what we offer them so more of them come but yet they are not giving them any jobs or giving them dumpsters or porta potties and offering them vacant sites where they can set up their camps. Now with corona, more homeless people now.

Nintendo Switch, yeah $80 USD for a pair of joy cons. I think the games cost fine and the prices are the same as always before and they went up a little bit because they now cost $60 but we still have games that cost $40 or $50 as always before from when I was a kid. $300 USD for a Nintendo Switch, about average price for a gaming system as always. So prices for video games and their systems have pretty much stayed the same but I think Nintendo Switch is expensive for their accessories. $30 for a charger? $50 for a wireless pro controller so I get wired ones instead that cost $25 or $20.

I also got NES and SNES Switch controllers and those were pretty expensive but I used my money I saved and earned from my adult content.


How I survive this economy is I am frugal and I look out for deals. I found a wired Pro Controller for $17.99 USD at a TJ Maxx. I can even find good things at Goodwill. I once got a brand new pair of joycons there for $50 and they started drifting in less than a year and had to toss them out and found another brand new pair as a used gaming store for $70. Joycons are very prone to drifting so I try to use the buttons more than the c stick if I can. But some games make you use the c stick because you can't move the character with the arrow buttons. Those games will do great wear on your joy cons. Best to play them on the TV set and use a Gamecube controller or something. Mine are starting to drift again because I had been playing Mario 3D All Stars. But the drift isn't bad. I can stop it when it starts to drift and it's back to normal. We had to buy our son new joy cons because the left one was drifting badly and giving him meltdowns and we got tired of dealing with it so we got him new ones. Now we have a calm kid again.

I paid like 600 krones for SNES SF II back in '93 or so , very expensive

There are very few limits on alpha capitalists rigging the system permanently in their own favour.

We're several Centuries into that now.

Rising world population figures don't help, but the main reason is that more and more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people who have no intention of letting any of it go. Though some practice selective philanthropy, by which I mean there's normally self-interest involved somewhere along the line. True unconditional charity is very rare and in any case only normally compensates for the rip-offs that provided the cash for the charity donations in the first place.

New Zealand and Scandanavia seem to be doing the best at the moment in terms of social equality, standards of living, and freedom from corruption, though they're by no means trouble free.