Oh, don't you worry -- you should I'm never one to shy away from yet another political post here.

I want to be an informed consumer, so I've been hunting for this double-digit inflation monster you Austrian types keep talking about, but I can't find him. I understand where you're coming from, but you're going to have to show me your source for the 10% inflation number.

Alternative inflation measures like MIT's Billion Price Index (which only covers goods, not services, and must therefore be compared to the equivalent BLS numbers) don't show any significant deviation from the core inflation numbers that BLS puts out. Every time I've seen a chart or table from a hard-money type purporting to show mass inflation, it's been shown to be focused on specific sectors (such as energy or food) that swing in price wildly from year-to-year, or the x-axis was constrained to show an inflation spike after a long, steady period of deflation. I have yet to see reliable evidence that inflation fears are warranted -- and yes, I know that it can come suddenly and spiral out of control -- but that does not mean we should ignore the equally destructive risks of deflation.

I have a coworker who follows the economy very closely who recently yanked all of his 403b money out of stocks and put everything into Vanguard's U.S. Treasury fund. He's seeing what I'm seeing, and what global investors are seeing -- the U.S. dollar is the safest investment vehicle in the world right now, and, if anything, we're headed for a period of deflation, not inflation, and since deflation is devastating for people with a lot of debt, I'm hesitant to pull all my equity out at a time when (in my view) all signs point to inflation risk as minimal to nonexistent.

But I'm happy to see what sort of data you've seen that I've missed out on!

The other aspect is, without at least 20% equity, I can't take out a home equity line to do future repairs, etc. My mortgage guy told me that as long as I get to 20%, I can then take 10% out as a loan basically the day after I sign, but still avoid paying mortgage insurance. So, even if I did want to max out my debt to take advantage of future inflation, putting some money in now might make sense.