***Personal Inflation Alert***

Can you identify the date and time you severed yourself completely from reality? Was it before or after the Matt Bevins victory party?

 

Although I cannot speak for him my guess it's probably around the time you developed the delusion that a failed real estate developer, former reality television star with a long history of running scams should be the president. It's also not beyond the realm of possibility that you believe that the said con artist was sent by the Almighty to save the country.

 

Getting back to the subject of this thread and speaking of the price of gas at the pump, in late June 2022 I paid $5.09 a gallon at my usual gas station, l paid $3.59 when I filled up a week ago.

 

Was inflation not global? What developed countries didn't experience high inflation over the last few years?

 

It didn’t cause ships to wait, but it damn sure made whatever was on those ships to be more expensive once it was unloaded and shipped. Governments overreacting and panicking the world population caused the ship back up. No reason in the world to shut down ports like they did.

If you care to read I said “governments”, not “our government”. By far, ours was not the only government that acted foolishly. Many governments did the same thing or worse as our did. But yes adding that much liquidity into the US economy will also impact world inflation.

Bottom line is that you can quibble all you want, but “our governments” foolish spending since late 2020 (I’ll give the first stimulus a pass, although it should have been more targeted) has impacted inflation somewhere between causing and being a major driver. Second and third stimulus, BBB, Inflation Reduction Act(it did nothing of the kind) were all huge wastes of money that drove the mess we are in and will keep driving it for several more years. Inflation rose cumulatively by about 20% since the end of 2020. That is undeniable. Its impact on housing and food may be more than that. Inflation has historically been called “the cruelest tax” on the poor and middle class. I would think that if Dems cared as much about those classes as they claim, they would not have supported policies that have harmed them so much.

 

Oh.



Suez Canal: Ships stuck in 'traffic jam' as salvage efforts continue


The blockage of Egypt's Suez canal by a giant container ship is causing a "traffic jam" in the Red Sea, according to a merchant seaman on a nearby ship.

Joe Reynolds, chief engineer of the Maersk Ohio, told the BBC the number of vessels waiting at the canal's southern entrance was "growing exponentially".

"It's going to affect shipping schedules around the world," he warned.
.....experts have said it could take weeks if the vessel's containers need to be removed.

 

COVID exposed a lot about how this nation operates. I think we could blame one side or the other, but I place the government response to the COVID disaster squarely on 21st century American democracy. We can blame the politicians, but we also know any politician who did not pander to the COVID frenzy on some level probably does not win reelection to office in 2020. Politicians remember political opponents and the MSM raking George W Bush over the coals for the government's response to Hurricane Katrina:

A decade after Hurricane Katrina — the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history — President Obama told a crowd in New Orleans that the storm was a "man-made" calamity that had as much to do with economic inequality and the failure of government as it did the forces of nature.

"What started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster — a failure of government to look out for its own citizens," the president said in a speech at a newly opened community center in the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly black neighborhood that was devastated by Katrina.

Obama was a freshman U.S. senator from Illinois when Katrina struck New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005.

The storm smashed the Gulf Coast from Texas to central Florida, causing power outages and a massive storm surge that topped the levees in the city, causing massive flooding. Nearly 2,000 people died, most in New Orleans, and another 1 million were displaced. Local and federal agencies were at a loss to respond effectively.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo...an-made-disaster-caused-by-government-failure​

Republicans knew the same political shell game could potentially play out with respect to the government's response to COVID. No one wanted to be on the other end of this type of political talking point, especially in the middle of an election cycle year, so most politicians went head over heels to overreact. Then they could not be accused of underreacting. No one wanted to be roasted 24/7 around the clock by the MSM.

 

That is recent occurrence Jo, I think you know that.

 

Who said anything about acceptable? If high inflation was acceptable, the fed wouldn't be raising interest rates.

If everyone experienced a thing, maybe we shouldn't treat the thing like it is unique to one country?

If the only way you can hold onto your cherished beliefs is by ignoring the rest of the world around you, those beliefs probably aren't worth holding onto.

 

That is an occurrence that happened approximately 2 months into Biden's presidency - making it very relevant to assigning blame for inflation on Biden.

Clearly you DON'T know that, but one would think that you would.



Suez Canal: Ships stuck in 'traffic jam' as salvage efforts continue
26 March 2021

 

Explain to me how that’s not Trumponomics too. Didn’t everything shut down and massive stimulus get passed when the GOP controlled the White House and the House of Representatives?

You can blame it on the government response. But to lay the blame solely on Biden and call it “Bidenomics” is completely full of shit. Y’all act like the GOP wasn’t driving the bus for the first 9 months of COVID.

 

I definitely agree. People don’t want to face up to difficulties. They want mommy and daddy to “make it go away”. The political aftermath of Katrina was horrible. A Cat 5 hits a low lying major population center. What could go wrong? Well apparently people expected nothing to go wrong. And if the people were handling it okay, then the political opportunists would come along to stir the shit back up from the bottom

 

Why? They didn't engage in the massive stimulus the US did. So they shouldn't have high inflation, according to the theory you have laid out for the US having high inflation.

If the theory doesn't match reality, we can adjust reality or we can adjust the theory.

 

I give Trump no pass on Covid. Fauci should have been walked out the door after his first contradiction. He should not have been allowed to do hundreds more.

The first stimulus should have been more targeted. No need to give everyone (well not everyone, we didn’t get a dime) a check. The second stimulus again should have been even more targeted. Again no need to give everyone a check. The third was totally uneccessary.

 

We are part of a global economy. You may be the person with the nicest house on the block, but if all your neighbors don't take care of their own houses, regardless of what you do, your house value will fall. Because you are all part of the same neighborhood.

I know you don't care about the rest of the world, but the rest of the world is interconnected. The US simply cannot produce all it needs, nor can we consume all we produce. Therefore, trade is a necessity. Take oil, for example. While we produce more than we import, much of what we drill isn't a high enough grade for our energy consumption. Therefore, we must import oil from other countries. And if OPEC countries decided to slow production down, what would happen to prices? They would rise.

Global inflation rates in 2022 started to rise to an average of over 7% in August. That simply cannot be due to monetary policies. It was due to the pandemic. At first, prices dropped because of a sharp drop in demand when everyone was staying home. But this quickly changed once the pandemic was over, because everyone staying home meant significant drops in supplies because people weren't working and producing. We also have labor shortages here at home, and when people began producing again overseas, we couldn't handle the influx of materials all at once, causing ships to wait out at sea before they could dock and unload.

There were countries that didn't spend over their norm and still experienced significant inflation. While monetary policy may and did contribute to US inflation, it cannot explain the giant kinks in the supply chain that happened all over the globe. Nor can monetary policy explain labor shortages, which was already going to happen pre-pandemic due to an aging baby boomer population. Throw in excess deaths of working aged persons due to the pandemic, and many who decided to retire early instead of risking getting sick, and the problem got here a little sooner than anticipated. Add in about 1 million legal immigrant workers that Trump cut, and that didn't help either.

I don't care if you only care about the US, and think what happens around the globe doesn't effect us. Because that's a stupid opinion, and doesn't deal with facts. And while people are entitled to their own opinion, they are not entitled to their own facts. And facts were, the inflation was global, the supply chain kinks were global, and the labor shortage was and is global too. To think this doesn't effect us is pure ignorance.

 

They all engaged in some level of stimulus and the all dropped rates. There was a lot of liquidity flowing.