> Deflation results from not printing money. When the growth in the amount of stuff in the economy exceeds the growth in the amount of money in the economy - each dollar becomes worth more over time. That is deflation. Yeah you can sit on it and take it as passive gains. You can also use those gains in your spending power to achieve even greater things. It's up to the person.

It is, indeed up to the person. But if you offer billionaires risk free gains from turning their billions into cash and burying it in the ground (quite literally at the expense of everyone else having to work harder to make up for it), even the ones that are willing to invest or lend need to extract more out of the poor to make it worth their while.

Again, when it's tautological the policy you are advocating gives the idle rich risk free real gains at the expense of the working poor, it is impossible to argue with a straight face that the implications are beneficial for equity and growth...

> As for the past having higher mortgages, this provides data on such from 1950. [1] "...the typical monthly mortgage payment [of] $54.31 for principal, interest, FHA mortgage insurance premium, hazard insurance, taxes and special assessments, and any miscellaneous items such as ground rent." 1950 median personal was $3300, so a house mortgage cost 20% of that. Current median personal income is $45k, so that'd be a mortgage on a new house of about $750 with tax/insurance/assessment/etc included in that. We can safely reject the claim that mortgages were higher.\

I am not sure why you are pretending that this was a period of sustained deflation though. Au contraire, the large increase to housing supply in the 1940s coincided with CPI being much higher than recent averages, driven in part by a relaxation in monetary policy to support war financing and full recovery from the Great Depression.[1]

We're not interested in reinventing the 1950s though, we're interested in how to achieve deflation. Since monetary base growth has an inverse relationship with interest rates, eliminating it implies structurally higher base interest rates, which implies homebuyers pay more money to the bank for the same house (which is almost guaranteed to be worth significantly less than its financing costs). No amount of inaccurate historical claims is going to dress that up as a progressive move that will make housing more affordable.

> Yet when you look at what people could buy in the past on a typical median salary, or the lifestyle it could provide - it almost sounds like make believe, and is way more than enough to make one wonder what went wrong?

Seriously, you'd rather live in the 1950s where according to the report there's a 5% chance you don't have a toilet, never mind extreme luxuries like a toilet or television. Well I guess at least aspiring to that lifestyle is consistent with your enthusiasm for policies that enrich the haves at the expense of the have nots...

[1]A Great Depression which is the last period to actually sees sustained price falls for more than a quarter or two, which was also the last period to see free convertibility of the USD to gold. It was a period of 25% unemployment...