With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
My facebook is filled with lament and horror, the kind of which I had mostly not seen recently applied to Trump by media and most acquaintances. There is much discussion about people "losing rights" moving forward. I kind of thought people had started to get over their TDS. I really hope this is just a temporary relapse, and not an indication of a return to 2016 to 2020 levels of leftist obstructionism for the next four years.
One more based leftist friend has this to say:
I think this take is very correct, and has a lot to do with why Trump won. If there's one issue I care about a lot on a less rational level, it's the fact that my spending power is significantly decreased, and I blame the current administration, rationally or not, for not making things better. I worry about what's going to happen to me and my family for the rest of our lives. Will we be able to retire? Will we be able to afford good schooling? Will we be able to maintain a comfortable lifestyle?
However, I also wanted to ask people here if this is rational. Did Biden do much to make this the economy so terrible? Or was it inevitable, or even did Trump cause it? It seems these are the most likely causes:
I think the consensus on this forum in the past has been that 1 was the true cause, and 3 was really just a red herring. If that's the case, does Trump deserve to be the one people turn to for relief? Or did he cause it to begin with during his last year as president? Is he actually going to make anything better now?
It’s not limited to America, but the sharp erosion of purchasing power is a direct consequence of inflationary fiscal policy (#1). Other factors mattered, but this was central.
Inflation is caused by a mismatch between aggregate supply and demand. If demand ($ in the hands of consumers/firms/governments they want to spend) outstrips supply of the goods and services available to buy, those goods and services get rationed and allocated by raising the price. At the start of the COVID reopening, demand outstripped supply for a small subset of products which was interpreted as “transitory inflation”. In other words, supply chains are a mess and consumer preferences are rapidly shifting causing relative prices to move. The only way all prices move up together is either total economic output is falling or demand is rising too fast.
Of course, during COVID supply was severely impaired but so was spending so inflation didn’t increase. People who kept their jobs began saving aggressively and COVID relief was paid for with debt instead of with tax increases. When the economy reopened all that money hit the economy all at once and inflation took off.
So maybe that was unavoidable given our pandemic policies, though I am less sure about whether lockdowns were worth it or whether we should have borrowed for relief. If society really “wanted” lockdowns we should have jacked up taxes to pay for them and forestall massive savings accumulation.
But then the initial burst of inflation didn’t end. It kept going for years and would have been worse if the Fed hadn’t raised interest rates hugely. Retirement of baby boomers and business failure meant some loss of supply, but demand was continuously boosted by big spending bills. In Canada half of the giant pandemic era spending bills weren’t even pandemic related and persist today.
The easiest way to see this is by looking at the trend change in Nominal GDP. That’s a measure of raw spending in the economy. All that extra money came from somewhere.
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