Yeah, every time you see “the economy” mentioned in a news article, especialy business news, just replace it with “the 1%’s money” and it will make sense.

The rich are squeezing everything they can out of the 99.9%, and are the only ones that can afford to save.

That's not entirely accurate. The rich use a system to their benefit that was created by politicians and bankers to make bankers richer, and that gives politicians access to unlimited money. Surplus spending and inflation can squeeze everything out of the 99.9% just fine.

I love the verbal visualization;

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

The thing is, these numbers are unfathomable to most people.

If you say, "government gave $30B in subsidies to car companies", most people will stare at you blankly and shrug...

But people will get really angry if they see a headline like, "man commits $5000 of welfare fraud", or "goverment spent $100 000 housing 5 refugee families" because those are real numbers to them.

Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.

The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.

They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.

Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."

"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"

I mean there's where inflation is coming in

The last part of your first paragraph is what I truly don't understand. If I pull a trash bike from the garbage pile and sell it to an idiot as a vintage bike and he pays me 50000 dollaroos for that, I just scammed that dude. The bike still belongs in the trash.

I don't see this changing until the housing supply exceeds the demand. At the rate we build, that's not happening any time soon.

The house isn't creating new wealth. The new wealth was created elsewhere in the system and used to pay for the house. The value of the house going up isn't the same thing. Now if you use the increased value of the house to back a second mortgage, that's when you're creating wealth. But you're doing it through the fractional reserve banking system, whose entire job is to create wealth by loaning out copies of money.

My God, that's right in line with the old royal weddings from the divine right age. Nobody should be that rich.

According to "AI", glue is is an acceptable pizza topping. Let's not confuse the ability to form sentences with the ability to reason or produce fact-checked information.

They need another zero. It's shockingly low in a conversation that includes billionaires but it's not working class America low.