I wonder how many Trump supporters watch without realizing that Mr. Potter in all his greed and lack of empathy is Trump (though in fairness, arguably a better businessman than Donnie). I'm going to wager all.
There was a post a few days past about someone watching the movie with his dad and his dad just says he'd shoot Mr. Potter.
OP then asked his dad, "so you're okay with shooting the CEO now?"
Dad shut up about it after that.
Conservatives like to believe that they are the heroes of the story. Where they are the paragons of virtue but in reality, they want to control and oppress people. That's it.
I remember years ago someone ran down what Potter's horrible, evil, awful, inhuman, immoral, interest rate was on his loans...
2%.
They watch it and think how nice it is that angels exist.
You know it's a movie right? It's not real life
Yea, when has any art form been an allegory for real life.
Nawwwww, REALLY!!?
I thought celestial beings and angels really existed, traveling light-years to bail out the likes of George Bailey!
Golly gee-wizz, it's not like fiction commonly reflects real life or anything.
What's the famous adage? "Art Imitates Life."
Tell me, do you really think the writers of the film didn't have someone like Trump — or his father — in mind when writing the character of Mr. Potter? Are you sincerely sitting behind your little screen telling me that such people do not exist and aren't obvious out in the wild...?
But then I suppose some people are better judges of character than others...
It's not real life
You're right. It's a wonderful life. Says so right in the title.
5 grand back then was like 80k today i think
WAAAAAY more 5k back then was buy a house money. 5k back in the setting of the movie 1912-1934ish? Was ≈260 ounces of gold. So today that is $680,000 today which is definitely enough to afford a nice house.
We are given inflstiin stats using consumer price index as the main metric of measure but CPI is beyond inadequate primarily because it does not account for the devaluation of a currency due to the increase in circulating currency supply.
For 172 years the price of gold stayed constant only changing when fdr made it illegal to hoard more than a certain amount of gold, bought back all the gold, built fort knox to store it in and then after they were certain they had a majority of the support in the usa they revalued it from $19 to $35 so for the first 172 years after the Usa implemented a standard currency (the us dollar) gold only fluctuated ≈80% but since nixon ended the gold standard in 1971 the price of gold has ballooned 7500% to $2650 last time i checked. And this all corresponded perfectly with the amount of money printed into supply. After nixon pulled out of the bretton woods agreement in 8 years the price of gold had increased 2000% just under $800 and within a year of that spike the us printed the first trillion into circulation now we print one trillion every 3-4 months.
I could elaborate on why the value of money is intrinsically tied to the price of gold but it is an argument i make regularly and ill wait till the choir of people who trust the criminals of wall street who's business model is committing fraud, exploiting the poor and robbing the working class chimes in
But $5000 today is less than 1% of the gold $5000 was 90 years ago but despite that its still an impossible amount for most people to accumulate.
This is a common talking point, but much of what you've said isn't true. We did not have enough gold to cover every dollar the whole time under Bretton Woods, about 65% at the end of WW2, and it wasn't out of the blue that Nixon withdrew from the agreement.
If we had tried to maintain that system, we would have either lost all our gold due to countries taking advantage of the price difference between the peg and gold markets worldwide, or we would have had to restrict dollar supply to the point we would no longer be the reserve currency of the world, neither of which were in our country's interest.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Late_application
CPI isn't perfect, but it's more indicative of real world concerns of average person. I don't care about gold, but I do care about goods accounted for in the CPI.
Just because a commodity is roughly fixed in amount and availability not as easily manipulated by making up numbers does not mean it has some magical absolute "value". Value is always subjective and heavily based on context.
Offer me a bar of gold for everything in my pantry today? Sure thing, I know I can get a lot more money and refill my pantry. If you made that same offer, but people are disinterested in gold? No, because ultimately that bar is useless to me without the wider context of people willing to part with significant resources in exchange for the gold.
Modern monetary policy is as much about psychology as it is about math. Gaming the system so that, largely, people have a number that behaves predictably to general goods and services over time. In the great depression, the relative value of gold in real terms fluctuated wildly, and society exploded in no small part due to people's feelings relative to the numbers despite the fundamentals not changing much between "things are going great" and "everything is ruined".
I'm lucky to be able to save £100 a month, mainly because I sold my car. Wait for it, because of a new train station opening within walking distance. Just having a month's wages put aside feels great, small steps.
5k in the bank?
Some day...
I actually saved that much in about 5 months.
there's always gotta be at least one "let's all pay attention to how this isn't a problem for ME" chud in the comments
Yeah! Sucks for the Americans, though.
12k a year - gets really depressing when you realize how many years it takes to buy a house, and in America how many years a small medical event costs you.
Yeah, it's really not much at all... Our government actually recently set up this thing where they'll cover the cost of a house for young working people, but even then it's really tough to buy. I don't want to buy anytime soon, but still, it's a real struggle for lots of people.
Sucks on the healthcare in America. Hope you guys get something worked out over there... :C
The number of people on lemmy who are apparently dirt poor and don’t comprehend money or the economy is ridiculous.
Anything short of declaring yourself a homeless disabled pensioner eating rats to survive will get hostile responses around here, and even then someone would claim rats are a luxury.
I don't know about all that...
I just meant for it to be a factoid I guess, didn't think much about when I posted. When I saw all the notifications I was actually expecting to see people were as excited about potatoes as I am --- I made a post about it last night.
Lots of people do struggle, I think it's fair to point out how hard it is to save for some.
