Nah, it's not "unreasonable", it's "rich".

Sort of like how a crazy rich person is "eccentric".

Qualifications are essential if you aren't one of the very richest people nor extremely lucky.

Not so much, really... it only takes a couple of generations to divide that up so that the "very richest" are the ones that, themselves, started companies that became worth billions.

Only 3 of the top 100 billionaires inherited their wealth (Walton family). There are 22 "families" on that list... the individual members largely wouldn't hit the list (and those "families" are ones where they together built the family business, not through inheritence).

It is true, though, that many top billionaires were supported by their rich-but-not-top-echelon families in starting their businesses.

Ah yes, English... the language where you can verbify any noun, then change it back and engage in verbification.

No, but you're forgetting that each letter is, itself a noun referring to that letter. Plus a few that are other words with their own dictionary entries.

Incomprehensibility is a 19 letter word with 8 syllables, FWIW.

Perhaps it's not in the top 50,000... but that seems incomprehensible to me ;-).

> But for every number between 0 and 1, there are two correlating numbers (x+1 and x+2)

There are an uncountably infinite number of ways to correlate numbers in any open set of real numbers... they all have the same "count" in that they can all be correlated to all of the other reals with unlimited simple relationships.

Example: 1/2x is also in (0,1) just like x+2 and x+3 exist outside of that range. So is 1/(pi*x)...

Ultimately it's a semantics question about how you measure the "number" of things in an uncountably infinite set.

Consider "every real number" x in (1, +∞). There is a corresponding real number in (0,1) which is 1/x. So the sets are exactly the same size.

So... The cost of some typical package of average consumer goods, adjusted for inflation is...

... pretty much by definition going to be close to constant.

Indeed, it not being constant is more a demonstration of invalid inflation measurements than anything else.

Lots of jokesdubious observations to be made here based on the fact that:

price = demand / supply.

> Homeowners and renters are equivalent other than the method they use to pay for housing.

Sort of similar, yes, but you have to admit that renters will pay less rent in an environment where the lessor can deduct their business expenses than when they can't... all else being equal.

So is that savings due to the business deduction a subsidy to them or not?

Ok, well let's look at the mathematics of this particular example them.

Let's say that we decided not to provide a deduction for homeowners' mortgage interest.

Would the business expense deduction for loan interest and depreciation provided to companies renting apartments be a subsidy to them because we decided to start taxing homeowners, when it wasn't before?

Indeed, is any business expense deduction a "subsidy"? And to whom? Or is it just taxing their profit rather than their revenue?

Is a charitable contribution deduction a subsidy for the charity, or the donator? And if the latter... what is it subsidizing, if not the charity?

It's really a lot better to think of only money and services provided to someone in excess of the taxes they pay related to an activity to be a "subsidy".

This stuff is nothing but semantics.

That's an entirely arbitrary distinction.

Not taxing something simply isn't a "subsidy", it's letting people keep their own money.

A "subsidy" is giving them someone else's.

Naturally... this is all a semantic argument... and we can't completely forget that money is fungible, but still... it's kind of an abuse of language to call it a subsidy.

So... taxing car use is a subsidy to walkers?

Ah yes, the old argument that not taxing some activity is "subsidizing" it, as though the natural state of things is all activity being taxed.

> If there were fewer job openings than job seekers

At current offered wages. The only way to fix that, ironically, is inflation.

>They cannot employ enough people to keep up with demand.

Not because those people don't exist, presently (as in Japan's case), but because of external factors.

But even if they didn't exist, though, the only answer other than "everyone just suffers" would be more automation... which requires... capital that high interest rates make scarce.

> Higher interest rates curb consumption, full stop.

Higher interest rates curb all economic activity, both supply and demand.

Effectively, they are an attempt to create a recession... which is fine if the problem is everything is in a bubble that needs a correction...

But in conditions where the inflation is primarily due to supply shocks for reasons external to basic economics, like now, and like Japan because of their demographic collapse, there's a serious risk of creating stagflation, which is strictly worse than inflation.

> High interested rates fix inflation,

Only if the reason for the inflation is too much economic activity, rather than too little.

I.e. if demand is the primary problem rather than supply. Hint: today the problem is supply, not demand, and we need more industrial activity rather than less.

While it's not likely, "stagflation" is an incredibly ugly word.

Yeah, OP totally burned the lede.

It's always nice when scientists reproduce the Mythbusters' experimental results.

I especially like that you used fall colors to show this :-).