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COVID-19. The inflation that everyone hates was a result of COVID (and other knock-on effects like price gauging), and not all Biden's fault. Biden has been cleaning up after Trump's awful pandemic response, and it's all Biden's fault apparently, so let's give the job back to the guy who messed it all up in the first place.
Isn't that how it always is? Republicans fuck it up and leave Dems to fix it? I feel like that's mostly all the Republicans campaign on.
They blame everything on Democrats and take credit for all the positive things they voted against. Their uninformed base eats it up.
I had a trucker come into work today already making excuses for Trump. He was all happy that the Republicans will likely have control of the big 3. Told him that I guess there's no excuse for any failings then since the democrats won't have the majority to stop them. They can "fix" the economy. Without missing a bear, he says the democrats are just propping up the economy and it'll crash again.
COVID means everyone needs to work less, that means that every product that is a result of people's work decreases in availability, and thus, increases in cost.
This is a fundamental aspect of any major disruption, including the war in Ukraine, that will drive up prices.
The problem that Democrats and most Liberal governments have is that they just let this happen. The reality of the situation is that the poorer you are, the more of your money goes to necessities, so when the price of necessities rises, the more of your money is lost to inflation. If you only spend 10% of your income on necessities and the rest goes to frivolous things, then you can just cut back on them no big deal, you can shift that money to investments and actually profit off the inflation. But if 90% of your money goes to necessities, than you have no choice and 90% of your money just got less valuable.
Inflation is a frustrating and abstract word that just hides one of that ratchets that keeps rich people rich. They do not pay the costs of inflation (or pay them last). Every single time there is an inflationary event, be it a natural disaster caused by climate change, a war, a pandemic, etc, taxes should immediately rise on the wealthy to pay for it. If they do not, then, it is a tax on the poor and working class that will be hand waved away as "inflation".
I remember some self-congratulatory headline crowing about how happy we should all be that inflation had slowed and thinking...
In the mean time "the economy" is booming and companies make record profits. This should have been addressed but wasn't, Biden never got the mandate to fix it, he did not have all 3 branches he needed.
Now the republicans do have the mandate, to do anything they deem nessecary. Let's see how it pans out, It's either massive spending like last time and it will be okay ish for the economy. If it's austerity, the whole world is fucked.
Yeah, anytime there's a split house / debate / presidency in the US, all the Republicans have to do is obstruct progress or anything from being done, and then workers end up paying the price.
It's why being centrist isn't good enough, whenever the Democrats get full control they need to be trying to drastically shift things back, but they have always failed to do so.
That is because building institutions is A LOT harder than tearing them down. The dem variant would most likely be something like stopping all subsidies to corporations and giving the money to the poor, and working up. just cash in hand, you sort it out yourself.. sort of like UBI.
Edit: but the scarcity in things like the housing market would mean everything immediately jumps in price..
The fuck it was. That inflation was already brewing in the wings; Covid just hypercharged it.
This falls on the Fed for their inane 14 YEARS of open purse monetary policy, despite the economy requiring no stimulus. They (Fed again) finally threw the brakes when it was impossible to avert disaster.
Meanwhile, Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen happily spent their public appearances gaslighting the country that inflation was "transitory," while the average American faced 40-YEAR inflation, on the backs of ongoing stagnant wages and a Federal minimum wage that hasn't increased since 2009.
It was absolutely not Covid; it was willfully bungled monetary policy from a hack Wall St lawyer, non-economist.
Even that doesn't tell the complete story. The most proximate cause was Trump bullying the Fed to lower interest rates in late 2019, to bail him out for his disastrous tax giveaway to the rich and trade war with China (which he's about to restart, by the way).
100%
I made some comments earlier about how Trump will soon have Powell turning tricks in a back alley. Nevertheless, it has been Powell's hand on the tiller, and ultimately the responsibility for the work is his purview.