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A recent YouGov poll showed that, regardless of support of opposition, 55% and 52% of Americans respectively believe that increasing domestic oil production and "investing in strengthening the supply chain" would lower inflation. Increasing domestic oil production may lower energy prices but this is the kind of thing that takes years. Companies are intentionally limiting their drilling operations to avoid having a crash like in 2014, and they aren't going to drill beyond their current long-term plans unless there's some kind of subsidy, which would be inflationary in the short term. I don't know what "investing in strengthening the supply chain" means but any time people talk about investing in a political context it normally means more government spending which, again, would be inflationary in the short term regardless of its long-term effects.
Next up, 47 and 44% of respondents, respectively, thought that fining companies for price gouging and having the government enforce limits on price increases would lower inflation. I won't comment on the appropriateness of price gouging laws generally, but those that do exist aim to prevent sharp price increases of goods in limited supply in situations where there are acute shortages. It's hard to argue that price increases of a few extra percentage points annually (or even 20% annually) is price gouging in the traditional sense. Enforcing price controls sounds good in theory until you go to the grocery store and discover they're out of half of the items on your list. Those price tags look good, though.
Those are actually fairly reasonable, though, because next we have a couple of real doozies. 38% of Americans believe that cutting taxes would decrease inflation, compared with only 19% who believe it would make it worse and 17% who believe there would be no change. And 35% believe that lowering interest rates would curb inflation, compared with 25% who think it would make matters worse and 14% who believe it would have no effect. I'll let those ones speak for themselves. On the other side of the coin, 31% believe raising interest rates actually helps inflation compared to 32% who think it makes matters worse. 29% believe that reducing the number of foreign imports would cut inflation compared to 22% who believe the opposite. The only semi-reasonable position on the whole list is that 33% believe reducing spending on social services would help, compared to 17% who believe it would make things worse.
Is this the same poll the_nybbler was complaining about below?
It can’t just be poor phrasing, because some of those beliefs are pretty unambiguous. It probably isn’t mere partisanship, because Have You Seen Gas Prices Lately has been universal, and partisan criticism has been focused on doing something/anything rather than on efficacy. There’s a case for economic illiteracy—raising rates means I pay more, so it must be inflationary, right?
Regardless, it’s depressing.
Yeah, it's the same poll, and it's totally economic illiteracy. I'm no fan of Biden but when I talk to conservatives about inflation they assume that Democratic "big government" spending policy is the cause of this mess and that it will abate as soon as Republicans take control of congress. While there's certainly an argument for less spending these people inevitably point to Trump-era pandemic policies that have already ended. I don't know how many times I heard that the labor shortage was caused by enhanced unemployment benefits months after those benefits had ended, or how the eviction moratorium was an issue even though the hated Democrat Tom Wolf signed an order ending it well before anyone was complaining about it.
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Was that one Saudi caused?
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