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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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Inflation only goes one way. We're not getting deflation without a recession.

I hope there aren't too many people under the delusion that 2019 prices can come back

uhhh... yes. I was going to add an aside but deleted it because I guess I wrongly assumed it was understood in the frame. That was implicit in the 'cumulative effects' point.

I had a point about building a bridge over the cliff faster than the car was accelerating, but deleted it because it didn't add to the illustration.

Deflation is irrelevant to my point about why a blank 8% was more than 6% doesn't tell the story about cost of living pain.

We came of a decade of very low inflation and a rapidly expanding economy. Then in the first part of this decade, we felt that expansion slow down combined with extremely high inflation. This ate up a lot of the slack in the system. Now under Trump 2, inflation is still too high, and the increase in earnings isn't being felt by the people. So depsite it being less 'too hihg' than under Biden, it can still hurt more. None of this requires expectations of deflation to explain why comparing Biden's highest high to trumps high doesn't tell the story or produce a conundrum

Inflation is 3ish% in 2026 compared to around 2 for the last decade before. It's not great but it's a far cry from the earlier highs. It's not even close.

In 2020 the frog got told to stay home from his job at the frog soup factory, and after he came back he suddenly freaked out about how hot the water is.

Now the factory is not going to stop making frog soup, but it's gonna take either a while or a big world event to convince the frog that the water's just fine.

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