Inflation Scaremongering

DaveSchmidt said:

drummerboy said:

meanwhile, here's Vox. Usually fairly reliable, but here they're comparing prices to the pandemic year, when travel demand was at unnaturally low levels. What would a chart that went back to 2019 look like?

Looks like Vox took a AAA news release from two weeks earlier and created the charts. So AAA did the comparing, and Vox repackaged it graphically for a holiday-week tweet. Your mileage from tweets may vary.

Gas prices are up 31% from Thanksgiving 2019 ($2.59).

Right, AAA was reporting facts about costs, for people who wanted to make their travel plans. Vox was "reporting" about the economy, and so could and should have given more context

An alternative POV:

What’s With Biden’s Approvals?

When you combine all the events outlined above, inflation, the pandemic, the normal thermostatic public reaction, it’s not too hard to see why Biden’s approval is slumping. Yet all across Democratic punditland there are people calling for Biden to make more speeches, change his message, get out there and sell, hold press conferences, conscript party members to do the same, fight back! The press is covering it as a major crisis, largely driven by “wokism,” culture war issues and yes, an agenda that they are pushing the public to see as far too ambitious. (I heard one anchor on MSNBC ask a while back, “is the Biden administration just too liberal for America?” when reporting on the latest poll numbers.) It’s a wonder that Biden’s numbers are as high as they are.

...

Perhaps Joe Biden, having been around for a very long time, has a sense of this and is just carrying on without responding to the carping and hand-wringing with the knowledge that much of this is out of his hands and that which isn’t will not be solved by “messaging” or speeches. A lot of being a successful president is just how skillfully you ride the wave.

Another part of the issue is that we had 4 years of T**** - people are accustomed to the president tweeting 100 times a day, lying and attacking those who don't praise him.

He would also take victory laps on a daily basis touting the stock market prices and low unemployment.  T**** would expect a Nobel prize if he today's report that showed jobless claims were at their lowest level since 1969.

President Biden is re-establishing the norms of how a president should conduct themselves.  I'd be curious if there's any paper tracking # of Biden's lies like was done with the last guy.

nohero said:

Right, AAA was reporting facts about costs, for people who wanted to make their travel plans. Vox was "reporting" about the economy, and so could and should have given more context

Where was Vox “reporting” about the economy? To me, it looks like a standalone tweet that Vox created to illustrate AAA’s facts. For which expectations of context, like mileage, may also vary.

ETA: I suppose the reference to “increased demand” from last year’s pandemic Thanksgiving could have been fleshed out for those who needed more context.

I qualified for a free turkey from Shop-Rite for the first time!!  Only person home, and even with getting asked out to eat a lot! Could it indicate inflation?

Why is it always so difficult interpreting those political cartoons?  Is it the cartoonist the voodoo shaman putting those pins into the nation?  Seems like it.  I guess I'll direct my ire to him.

dave said:

Why is it always so difficult interpreting those political cartoons?  Is it the cartoonist the voodoo shaman putting those pins into the nation?  Seems like it.  I guess I'll direct my ire to him.

at least that cartoon fits in perfectly with this scaremongering thread.

Wasn’t Voodoo Economics a term George H W Bush used for the policy he backed and sold for 8 years when his former boss, both of which were Republicans, was President?

Bush used the term in the 1980 primary campaign when he was running against Reagan.

DaveSchmidt said:

Bush used the term in the 1980 primary campaign when he was running against Reagan.

Ah. So he did. THEN he backed and sold that policy for 8 years. Forgive me. I had forgot that he knew that Weidenbaum’s plan was **** BEFORE he became a sales person for it, rather than after.

ridski said:

Forgive me.

Pshaw. If I ever ask a question and you were witness to the answer, please chime in. 

ridski said:

DaveSchmidt said:

Bush used the term in the 1980 primary campaign when he was running against Reagan.

Ah. So he did. THEN he backed and sold that policy for 8 years. Forgive me. I had forgot that he knew that Weidenbaum’s plan was **** BEFORE he became a sales person for it, rather than after.

Weidenbaum's plan?

drummerboy said:

ridski said:

DaveSchmidt said:

Bush used the term in the 1980 primary campaign when he was running against Reagan.

Ah. So he did. THEN he backed and sold that policy for 8 years. Forgive me. I had forgot that he knew that Weidenbaum’s plan was **** BEFORE he became a sales person for it, rather than after.

Weidenbaum's plan?

https://news.stlpublicradio.org/economy-business/2014-03-23/murray-l-weidenbaum-washington-university-economist-chief-architect-of-reaganomics

I guess it depends on what you consider "Reaganomics" vs. "voodoo economics".  Pretty sure Bush was just referring to Reagan's claim that cutting taxes would increase tax revenues. Not sure Weidenbaum ever bought into that part very strongly, if at all.  Reaganomics consists of more than just the tax cut b.s.

@mtierney  

mtierney said:

I qualified for a free turkey from Shop-Rite for the first time!!  Only person home, and even with getting asked out to eat a lot! Could it indicate inflation?

I don't know.  It is usual and customary for thinking people to explain why they think it could indicate inflation.  

Can't remember which is the right thread, as both this one and the media crit one have ended up being about Biden's poll numbers, but:

Joe Biden’s Year Was Ruined. Whose Fault Is That?

The president doesn’t control the economy, and a lot of presidential politics is just plain dumb luck.

(Derek Thompson, The Atlantic)

should corporations be posting record profits as we suffer from inflation?

Wait, now we're suffering from inflation?  

I thought it was just the evil media making a tempest in a teapot. 

Smedley said:

Wait, now we're suffering from inflation?  

I thought it was just the evil media making a tempest in a teapot. 

It used to be a misguided media making a disturbance in a mug.

Smedley said:

Wait, now we're suffering from inflation?  

I thought it was just the evil media making a tempest in a teapot. 

can't tell if you're serious or not.

Walt Whitman, that great American poet, spoke for all of us when he said: 'I am the man. I suffered. I was there.' Today, I say to you, We Are The People, we suffered, we were there. We the People suffered in Vietnam. We the People suffered, we still suffer from unemployment, inflation, crime and corruption.

(anyone who IDs this w/o looking it up has my eternal respect)

good piece on inflation and it's probable real causes

The year over year consumer price index of 7.9%  released this morning is the highest in four decades. Ex food and energy it was 6.4%. 

We the People suffered, we still suffer from unemployment, inflation, crime and corruption.

Smedley said:

We the People suffered, we still suffer from unemployment, inflation, crime and corruption.

If you think inflation sucks, wait til you try deflation!

Have never seen deflation in my half century ish on this planet and I'm guessing I never will. Who knows though right?

I was primarily responding to the bitcoin bit, as bitcoin is by design a deflationary currency. Luckily for bitcoin, it has never actually succeeded in becoming a currency and is instead an asset -- it's a "currency" that allows people to transfer money in the same way luxury apartments in NYC and London are "currencies" for Russian oligarchs. Bitcoin's value rides on the fact that at the end of the day one has to trade it in for actual, inflationary currencies.

But as to your claim that you've never experienced deflation, that's actually not true -- we all did during the 2008 financial crisis.

PVW said:

But as to your claim that you've never experienced deflation, that's actually not true -- we all did during the 2008 financial crisis.

FWIW, I couldn’t find anything else to corroborate that reference when I came across the article earlier.

DaveSchmidt said:

FWIW, I couldn’t find anything else to corroborate that reference when I came across the article earlier.

My current chair doesn't have any arms, so if it turns out my claim is unsupported, happy enough to learn something new.

Hmm, you may be right to be suspicious of the claim that we experienced deflation in 2008. From a current Krugman column:

"But historical experience suggests that the effect of the output gap on inflation, while clear, is fairly modest. You can see this in the aftermath of the financial crisis: We had huge shortfalls in output relative to potential, but all we saw was a moderate reduction in the inflation rate, not a slide into rapid deflation."

(Wonking Out: What Overheaters and Skewers Have in Common, 2022-02-25)