There's a practice in the loan industry called "pretend and extend," which basically means endlessly extending credit to lendees who are behind to avoid acknowledging the loss. Remember, in Carvana's case the loan buyer only exists to take on debt, not be a going concern. I think much of the market actually realizes Carvana is a scam, they just see that it is a relatively sustainable one as long as the government doesn't step in. And they don't see that happening, particularly with the current administration.

Carvana is the poster child for this. It's astonishing that a company with a history of shady practices, and that has yet to offer a convincing explanation for why it is not a scam, is part of the S&P 500.

There's nothing wrong with it, in moderation. Where it becomes a problem is when the distribution of wealth starts diverging widely from people's expectation of what a fair distribution would be, accounting for different levels of ability and luck. Aside from this cognitive dissonance, there are also pragmatic limits on how big a disparity can be while still having a functional democracy. It's clear that truly enormous disparities in wealth, made even worse by a lack of regulation in political donation, lead to major distortions in the principle of "one person, one vote" which is a cornerstone of democracy.

>Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?

No, because people have different levels of ability and experience different amounts of luck. Inequality is inevitable, and the vast majority of people understand and accept that. But they also expect that the system should at least roughly resemble a meritocracy, and that is impossible to maintain in an unregulated capital system because of the feedback loop between capital and income. Most professional sports leagues recognize this problem: once a franchise starts winning, they make more money, which allows them to buy better players, which leads to more wins, etc, until you have a league where a handful of teams can win the championship and the others are perennial also-rans. So they cap the amount of money that can be used for salaries. They are free, of course, to make as much money as they can, they just can't plow it all back into player salaries. Capital is regulated to preserve the fairness of the system. That doesn't mean the teams are all equal, there are still franchises that perform better over time than others. But it's more clearly tied to intrinsic merit like coaching systems and player development, not just going out and buying proven superstars.

Similarly, a person of average skill can get lucky and make a large amount of money. Having that capital in turn makes it easier to make more money. Over time, and across many such situations, capital starts outrunning merit as a predictor of someone's future income, which is socially demoralizing. That's where the US is today: a pervasive feeling that the system is rigged. To a great extent, this widespread perception contributes to the current political climate in the US.

And that would be fine, but without more rigorous controls on corporate behavior, you'll end up paying more and not keeping your data.

For an unpopular tax, the property tax is remarkably ubiquitous. Are there really any popular taxes?

Not all bubbles are created equal. In the US, Republicans tend to rely on a smaller pool of news sources (https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-politi...). And those few sources are increasingly interdependent. Outlets like Fox News and Newsmax generally follow Trump's lead, which is how they got into trouble on the election fraud claims. in addition, the Republican Party actively works to insulate Trump from criticism via memes like TDS (literally implying that anyone who criticizes Trump has a mental illness) and "fake news" (simply dismissing inconvenient facts), for which there is no liberal equivalent.

Not according to this Redfin report (also linked by others in the thread):

"Take 28-year-olds as an example: 38.3% of 28-year-old Gen Zers owned their home in 2025, compared to 42.5% of Gen Xers when they were 28 and 44.4% of baby boomers when they were 28." (There is an accompanying chart in the linked report.)

https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation...

That seems to show a pretty clear decline in home affordability over time, for people of the same age.