I never said deflation cannot defer people's demand. The comment I originally responded to indicated that a deflation rate of 1% would, in general, discourage spending. I would wager, that almost no one defer buying an iPhone if they knew for a fact that it would be 1% cheaper a year later. Just as I don't think that knowledge that the price would be 1% higher a year later would cause someone to buy an iPhone they were not already planning on buying.

What I'm getting at is falling prices, in and of themselves, are not a huge problem. If you want to say that a deflation rate of 20% would cause huge problems, ok, maybe that's true for some products. Conversely an inflation rate of 20% would cause huge problems in some realms. Inflation is not generally good and deflation generally bad--that is the myth I'm addressing.

This is one thing I've never understood about this whole "inflation incentivizes people into spending now rather than later". If we're simply pushing the demand into the future, aren't there already people from the past whose "future time to spend" is the current moment?

<opinion type="rant"> From my perspective, all that I see inflation doing is artificially forcing people to put more money into the stock market and investing than they should be.