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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?
To actually answer your question:
I think 1 had a lot to do with it, though this is only partially attributable to Biden, and there's no indication that Trump would have done things differently. I think 2 definitely exacerbated the problem, but more importantly, it prevented the Biden Administration from taking early action to get it under control. The initial price spikes were in oddly specific sectors of the economy that were easily explainable as supply chain disruptions, and the administration wasn't about to treat inflation as a systemic problem and risk triggering a recession. I don't think 3 had much of an effect other than a temporary spike in gas prices, and I don't think 4 really applies since COVID caused so much disruption.
Three factors you didn't mention are first, that COIVD suppressed consumer spending somewhat, which let to a release of bottled-up demand once the pandemic ended. Second, COVID caused temporary job losses in the service industry. This also happened at a time when a lot of boomers were approaching retirement age, and the disruptions caused the retirements to come in a huge wave rather than being spread out over several years. these positions were largely filled by laid-off service employees, causing a labor shortage that was felt most acutely at the bottom of the labor market. $15/hour went from something people were advocating legislation for to something that places like Sheetz had to offer just to get applicants in the door. Finally, the Federal Funds rate was at zero for two years. While aggressive cuts were probably necessary at the beginning of the pandemic, once "the new normal" had set in there was no reason to keep them at zero. Once vaccines became widely available in the Spring of 2021 and concern over COVID was waning fast, the Fed should have begun gradual rate increases with the goal of eventually bringing them back to pre-COVID levels, assuming the signals remained good. Instead, they let things ride until inflation became apparent.
Trump may have played some part in this but given the situation, I'm not going to allocate blame among politicians. The problem with making this an electoral issue is that the problem has largely been solved; inflation is back down to within a point of the Fed's target rate. If people are expecting prices to return to 2020 levels then they're effectively asking for a serious recession. Inflation near 10% is annoying but it's something we can deal with, provided it doesn't last too long. 10% deflation would require something akin to the Great Depression; not just a recession, but a recession that we don't even try to mitigate. Trump's actual policy proposals and general tendencies show him making inflation worse. Tax cuts are inflationary, and we can expect some of those. Tariffs are inflationary, though probably not as much as critics suggest. He has a tendency to push for lower interest rates whether they're called for or not. And he's unlikely to balance these with corresponding spending cuts; in 2019 he pressured the Fed to cut rates during an economic expansion and has repeatedly suggested that the president have more control over monetary policy.
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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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I think the president has basically nothing to do with the economy. Regardless, Trump is planning to print money like never seen before, so I'm not sure why anyone would vote based on that.
Seems like you just contradicted yourself. The president has nothing to do with the economy, but Trump is going to print money and make the economy worse?
I meant that if someone thinks things like the national debt and money supply are important, they wouldn't vote for the candidate who wants to print more money and triple the deficit.
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You and @2rafa seem to have a two screens effect going on. I wonder why you’re seeing different things? Social class, demographics?
IME I'm seeing stuff more like OP than 2rafa, and it's why I expect Trump to win going in to election day. Several of my colleagues are not coming in to work today due to emotional distress.
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Yeah, probably. I don't doubt that what I'm seeing is non-representative. I think the most key demographic for my case is that I went to one of the most leftist schools in the country. A lot of my acquaintances I'm seeing this from (but not all) are from there. Those people are truly in bubbles within bubbles, and they're the sort of leftists who call each other out constantly for not being leftist enough or in the right way. They are probably most immune to receiving the memo that politics is less cool these days like @2rafa mentioned.
Maybe I also overstated when I said
Yes, there's been a very large uptick in it today and yesterday. There's a lot of it on my facebook, even by people who haven't seemed very political lately. But thinking back, it is really really restrained compared to what I saw back when Trump was first elected. You would have thought everyone's family was just recently killed, based on the reactions back in 2016. I think @2rafa is correct, it's much more limited than it used to be. I'm guessing the outwardly-facing reactions will just be a mostly temporary thing, for most people.
Edit: though, one of my acquaintances did just actually post that she feels today like she did the day her dad died, because she is afraid for her well-being as a "gender nonconforming disabled person".
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