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It seems to me politics are especially bad at countering inflation. People may be pissed off the "government isn't doing enough" to fix it. However, the levers the government can easily pull to fight inflation (raising taxes/interest rates, cut transfers/subsidies, lower consumption/wages) won't gain them any popularity points. Even worse, there are plenty of socially-desirable policies that'll make inflation worse: tax cuts, raises, loan forgiveness, more transfers. I'm grateful our system is even capable of doing unpopular things like raising interest rates. If monetary policy had heavier democratic influence, I'd worry high inflation would just be the long-term equilibrium.
Ontario's leader is under heavy fire for playing hardball and preventing educational workers from getting large raises. I don't know the details well, but couldn't one argue this is what fighting inflation looks like?
The government's policy economic policy has been so nutty that it's hard to believe inflation is not a policy goal. The trillions of dollars freshly printed and handed to people to *not * work immediately turbocharged the price of every equity and commodity. Instead of slowly raising rates early to counter the effect of unprecedented helicopter money and restrictions imposed on economic activity, they waited until a recession started so that they can see what it's like to hike into it. Energy is even worse. Governments are telling oil & gas companies that they need to invest in capacity, but also that they're going to shut it down in 10 years. I don't have a tendency to overestimate government officials, but nobody is this stupid.
I've been saying this for years, but every government policy makes sense if you assume they believe its going to fail in the next 10-15 years, and they're just looting all the valuables off to their hidden vaults while insisting everyone remain calm the eastern offensive is going to turn around.
None of the hard decisions about social security, Medicare, defense spending, the petrodollar, the deficit, the national debt, all the unfunded public employee pensions, the everything bubble, the housing bubble etc. are going to be solved before the next massive recession hits just as the boomers are all retiring...
This is the most favorable government cashflow is ever going to be (all the boomers are at the top of their career and peak tax paying) and the government's still insolvent. over the next 5-10 years all those valuable boomers are going to turn from the highest earning assets, into the largest liabilities any citizen has ever been in any nation...combine that with cold/hot wars with China and Russia, probably another Arab spring in 2023 with rising food costs, the subsequent hit to global oil markets... that's it.
The libertarians and fiscal hawks were saying we only had 30 years in the 90s, 20 years in the 2000s, 10 years in the 2010s... and now its next year or the year after.
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This is why western governments passed trillion dollar bailouts and gifts to their friends in 2020-21... they expected it was the last time they'd have the power to do it. They're just extracting the last dollops of money and power before the next big political happening kills the golden goose and strips them of power.
Do you have a citation on this? (Especially the implied consensus)
I was hearing about how the entire system was going to fail from deficits, inflation, and the demographic collapse of social security since 2008 when i was still in Gradeschool.
The centrality of the looming death of Social Security and medicare under the boomer's mass retirement has been a fiscal hawk talking point forever.
David Stockman, Regan's Budget manager, has been talking about almost nothing else since the mid-90s. This is also a perennial obsession of anyone related to Austrian economics. Anyone who's work appears at Zero hedge... this a founding narrative of the modern American economic right... and the timeline has not changed like other doom predictions, though several tried to suggest the market wold correct early in anticipation and a lot of people lost money gold speculating that inflation would suddenly hit in like 2012-2014...
But the narrative arc and the timeline of when social security and the empire would collapse under demographic and fiscal weight... that's always been late 2020s early 2030s and maybe a bit sooner if the market notices the gravity kicking in
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