Would that I could get a $9,000 COLA.

[icepixie]

So apparently the cost of living in Nashville rose by $9,000 in the last year.

That is not a typo. There is not an extra zero added on to the end there.

It's been real, transplants, but y'all can go home now.

Comments

[graycardinal]

I don't think it's a bubble, either. But I also don't think it's a straight supply-and-demand problem.

I think the essential trouble is that the 2008 mortgage meltdown happened as the result of lenders pumping lots of imaginary money into the system (in the form of debt that realistically wasn't ever going to be payable)...and none of the "solutions" implemented since then have dealt effectively with the essential unreality of that money. Result: the increasingly wide belief in the existence of vast pools of liquid cash *somewhere* in the economy that can be tapped to pay the tide of new $15/hour minimum wage salaries and/or allow workers in the shallow end of the labor pool to pay for housing built on the premise that all that phantom money was real.

But the reality is that it *isn't* real...thus, no $9K cost-of-living raises, and no way for (for example) a burger chain at the very top end of the local fast food niche to pay its workers $5/hour more across the board without entirely pricing itself out of its chosen market. (Yes, there's a group of local unionizers out here in Oregon trying to do just this.) And mid-to-high-level union shop earners who made (for example) 180% of min wage under the old order? Will never see that percentage again under the new one; 130%, maybe 140%, will be the new top of the scale.

The proper fix at the time would have been for someone -- probably the federal government -- to pull all those imaginary $$ *out* of the economy by simply and formally forgiving all that unpayable debt. Now? Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a straightforward way to untangle things without actively breaking some part of the economy.