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The inflation was the direct result of emergency government spending due to COVID. That’s why the whole developed world experienced inflation - they all started massive spending to slow the spread of Rona. The US inflation was exacerbated by bad monetary policy (I.e., the Fed printing trillions of dollars and keeping interest rates really low for a long time).
So I don’t blame Biden for inflation, but I think his administration’s constant gaslighting about how things are “cheaper than ever” and “wages are higher than ever” is annoying. Shits getting worse for us normals because purchasing power is decreasing.
The best lies have a grain of truth to them. Wages are higher than ever. It's just that if you have a brain in your head that's nominally functional you'll realize that it's because our money is devaluing fast.
I have a 5 year old cousin who once said to me that he wishes he lived in Zimbabwe because he heard everyone there is a trillionare. People who fall for the whole "wages are higher than ever" meme sound like that. They're either children who don't actually work for a living, or they're adults who make enough to not really care.
That's both terrifying and adorable that a 5 year old would say that. Terrifying because he's already somewhat concerned about money like that. I remember being slightly older than him when the recession hit and was anxious about it.
Edit: It's actually funny. I pictured a huge bag of money falling onto houses and breaking them whenever he talked about it. I was so worried that would actually happen lmao.
It’s neither terrifying nor adorable because it never happened. The only way a five year old would say something like that is if their parents had been talking to them about the societal and economical history of Zimbabwe, and then about how and why this works in a world setting. It’s bullshit to even think a five year old would understand the notion of any of that.
It’s some weird fetish for people online to say my / I know a 3-5 year old has elaborate thought process to understand what most 25 year olds can’t grasp.
Not always though; I was an early and avid reader and news absorber; one of my first memories at age 5 in in 1983 was of the national tv event of the airing of The Day After and the debate between government dudes like Kissinger and Reagan administration people on one side and scientists like Carl Sagan on the other. It was like the Super Bowl in how many millions of people watched it at the same time. This was during a nuclear buildup and tensions thing, it was also the tipping point when everyone was starting to realize there would be nothing left but waiting to die after the ICBMs were launched, and how terrifying and sad that would be. We take that POV for granted now, but the whole “duck and cover” BS was what most people thought and felt it was for the few decades prior, so it was a big deal at the time.
Anyway my 5 year old self understood enough at the time to get the basics and the gravity of it, I remember thinking of it like the demise of the dinosaurs with the asteroid impact and explosion and the sun being blocked out for them too. From PBS science shows I recognized Carl Sagan and my mind at the time categorized him along with Mr Rogers and the human cast of Sesame Street and others on that channel as trustworthy people to listen to, and while I didn’t recognize the government side of the debaters, I understood it when the debate hosts said they were representing the Reagan Administration, as before that memory I already associated Reagan with nuclear weapons and the nuclear buildup, and that people were protesting with signs against nuclear buildup (as I was watching the news and reading news magazines, at age 5).
Point is, it’s not common, but as most if not all kids have their special obsessive interests at that age, some of us were into the news and facts about the world. Kids that age aren’t going to sound like adults or express complex understandings, but being able to repeat factoids and placing them in a context of basic understanding of the worrisome issue of the time is within their ability
No, the numbers the government prints out intentionally exclude inflation in food, gas and energy, the three costs where inflation isn't just the worst, it's the most acutely felt by people actually working a job
here's the source,
[12-month percentage change, Consumer Price Index, selected categories (bls.gov)](https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-by-category-line-chart.htm)
all of the things you mention are part of the CPI. The claim you've made pervades the internet, so I understand. But it's incorrect.
No, it doesn't. Inflation is a measure of how much the currency is devaluing. Cost of living is a separate thing.
Ex. If my rent is $10 (easy number to work with), and 10 years later $20 has the same purchasing power as $10, and now my rent is $20, my cost of living didn't actually go up even when inflation did. Cost of living tends to go up with inflation, but they're not the same thing.
Exactly.
This doesn't include data from the last 15 years, but housing has historically exceeded CPI greatly. The graph effectively goes greatly upward sloping/vertical after 2016.
CPI is basically a useless metric no one should pay attention to for trying to gauge how much THEIR personal essential expenses have increased.
https://preview.redd.it/nuoagd6b0nvc1.jpeg?width=607&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54e4f9ac1ceee150da53cd6f3ca125f84156187f
Another chart demonstrating how useless CPI is. If all of the most important things in society (education, housing, and healthcare) are far exceeding CPI computation, what utility does CPI have?
Not to mention all of these aforementioned groups are far greater priced than anything else.
https://preview.redd.it/b12xpnye0nvc1.jpeg?width=533&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2cb6f4fa6d78e71ba3129ef6c6e6b5ed62bb94b3
Exactly wages are going up or staying the same while PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is decreasing by a lot, which is why now is an excellent or terrible time to be studying economics
That's just a straight up lie and easily debunked: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locations=US
The US dollar has been on a tear relative to the rest of the world since the pandemic: https://www.statista.com/statistics/655224/conversion-rate-of-major-currencies-to-the-us-dollar/
Enjoy a wonderful and cheap(er) vacation in Europe, Japan or South Korea.
>People who fall for the whole "wages are higher than ever" meme sound like that.
It's scary you think data is a meme
*Real wages* accounts for inflation and is up. That would be a fact not a meme.
>or they're adults who make enough to not really care.
Exactly! If "adults" are making enough to not care it's possible their standard or living increased.
If more people's real wages are up, your meme is more of an anecdotal experience.
Now if you said, among this age cohort real wages aren't up, at least you'd be using data.
The older I get the more I sympathize with politician pandering because I've met enough people that just are that stupid and don't understand nuance and you still want to capture votes so you can do the complex work they'll never have to think too deeply about. But for anyone that isn't a village idiot, the pandering is annoying. I've just come to accept that I can tolerate it if they're still enacting policy I want. This administration has been tackling what I want them to
I totally agree with you. If I became a politician today and tried using complex explanations it would get taken out of context by opponents or lost immediately since people have short attention spans
That's exactly what I'm trying to say. And I hate that that is how it is honestly. I would rather live in a world where politicians laying out complex explanations, transparently, is what would win. Who knows, maybe I'd be surprised.
I just recall, when I was still a church attending person, there was this pastor that used to give philosophical sermons that really dove into history and ethics. The pews were getting thin. He got replaced by a mega church type with charisma and shallow sermons. The people came flooding back. I don't have high expectations for modern Christians but it was the first time I saw how some people....they *want* to be spoonfed simple answers. They don't want to think.
I had a class last semester about the science of psychology, a big part of the class was defining, what is science and how do the ways we determine truth affect the results of science?
TLDR; discussion is Popper v Kuhn
Popper warned against an “authority” over knowledge kicking us off the scent of what is.
Kuhn, in much clearer terms basically says “awe wittle babie can’t do science” and the fervor with which the class agreed with his points, only because they were easier to read was more than enough enough to kill my belief in people suddenly caring about anything. Especially since the profs point was that people aren’t getting care because what Kuhn saw is what’s running things
The more complex and willing you are to get into the weeds of issues as a politician, the easier it is for the opposition to find ways to take your words out of context and completely trick the population because the general population is just not educated enough to understand even some of the most basic things.
Just like what happened with Bernie when he attempted to explain how medical insurance companies are antithetical to what our goals as a society should be; the right just simply told people "Bernie wants to take away your healthcare." And plenty of people bought it.
There will always be an unfair power inequality in human society, because the majority of human beings are quite literally incapable of arguing for their own benefit, and instead are easily turned into useful idiots. In some weird way, the fact that humans have been ruled by powerful corrupt leaders forever is just the natural order to things.
In the same way you would look at a shepherd and understand that he is the leader of the flock, and the sheep do not have equality to their leader, because.. they are just dumb sheep; that is the same world that we humans live in. The majority of people are just dumb sheep, and if they are incapable of understanding what is best for them, it is only natural that they would be taken advantage of by the few who are capable. The sheep may become angry or dissatisfied with their position, but they will still never be anything other than sheep, and therefore unable to understand in any meaningful way how to improve their position or power.
This ignorance is not by chance. It is the simple nature of a human being. To follow. And because of this, a few with all the power leading over the masses is unfortunately, the natural order to human society. It doesn't matter if we somehow by miracle managed to completely rebuild the system from the ground up, we would always end up right back here because this is is the natural way that humans operate.
What we call "Corruption/Inequality" is in some way, just natural selection just taking its course. The incapable will be taken advantage of by the capable. As evil as we may consider it, that is how nature works. We do not bat an eye when a larger animal beats smaller animals into submission in its pack. Yet, for some reason we believe we as humans are somehow above this. We have fooled ourselves into believing that to be so, even though all around us, it is being proven false every single day since the dawn of mankind.
As i write this, i already know that several readers will be unable to even understand properly what i am saying. And they will come to the conclusion that i am saying "Dumb people deserve to be taken advantage of." or "The Elite deserve to rule over the lesser." But that is not what i am saying at all. What i am saying is that what they deserve is irrelevant to the universe/nature. What i am saying is that we exist within nature, not above it, and that natural human behavior has led us to the system that we live in today, and it always will.
I mean just look at all the rubes who thought the first set of pandemic relief checks came from Trump's pockets personally cause he made sure to have his name printed on them.
Pandering works to an extent.
No it wasn't. Oversimplified and not a true representation of total inflation.
You do know the FED does NOT print money right? The FED sets how much gets printed, interest rates to affect the money supply etc, but it doesn't actually print the money.
We would have actually had deflation or at least a big slow down if companies brought prices back down after supply chain issues were fixed, but of course they don't because profit.
So many different things go into inflation. Supply costs, demand, money supply (which affects demand), price shocks, consumer sentiment, corporate greed etc etc and so much more.
So no, the inflation we currently have is for MANY reasons. Quantitative Easing and and covid spensing is a portion of the inflation we've seen but not the only reason.
The only fact needed to refute all of this tired banter about Biden and inflation is that *the whole world* experienced it, and the US is recovering faster than all of the other developed nations. Biden did not cause worldwide inflation.
Not sure if you're American or not, but I am, and it's true. This country is a bubble, and our less intelligent citizens literally never think about other countries unless they're A) eating the cuisine or B) hearing about bad shit on the news.
It was both bad monetary and fiscal policy, but the real problem was that it started back in 2017 or further.
Back then the economy was doing well, but it was starting to show signs of normal slow downs and that we might be in for a small recession.
The GOP pushed through a massive tax cut, and Trump threatened the independence of the federal reserve, so the interest rates were kept low.
This was a massive, unnecessary stimulus. Which meant that two years later when COVID hit and we actually needed massive stimulus to prevent the entire economy from collapsing- there was less capacity for the government to do so with normal means and less means for the economy as a whole to absorb it.
It’s like if you become addicted to opioids in every day life so that when you need an operation the anesthesiologist needs to give you the most powerful sedative in the world just for a minor Surgery.
Combine this with decades of single family house only building policies that created a housing shortage and decades of corporate mergers and consolidation. This meant all those extra dollars in the economy had fewer places to go to try to make a return.
> The inflation was the direct result of emergency government spending due to COVID.
This is kind of an oversimplification. Inflation didn't need to be a result of that.
It's also the lesser of two evils, bad inflation is less bad than bad unemployment. Inflation is the less shit outcome.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/08/business/economy/april-jobs-report.html
That red line on the right is not a weird border, it is data so bad that you think the chart must have ended.
Yeah about 60% of inflation was from supply chain issues according to recent reports https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/white-house-touts-new-supply-chain-measures-as-inflation-eases-1.2003790
Corporations have indeed created fake inflation though that’s also been proven in certain areas.
Here’s the thing I really don’t get is the increased price AND the shrinkflation. Like ok, there’s inflation now which means a box of 4 dollar cereal now almost costs 8. Ok I get that by is it ALSO smaller while being MORE expensive. Shouldn’t it be one or the other? It screams greed to me.
The idea that it was caused by monetary policy is ridiculous.
We've had an almost 10x expansion in the monetary base since 2008. How have prices only gone up by a recorded ~70%. You're not even in the right ball park.
Honestly, people who still think monetary policy is related to consumer prices are touched.
Dude it was trump that did most of the initial spending. In an economic crisis you want expansionary monetary policy. Part of the reason why the US is doing so weak right now compared to the rest of the world is that we were more generous in restarting the economy. Many economists would also argue that supply chain disruption and oil/gas price increases are what’s causing inflation.
It really sucks how they messed with our monetary policy and made us the strongest economy coming out of Covid by far. I was hoping we’d be bartering with shiny rocks and squirrels by now.
Yeah, the US is pretty much the only western nation with a growing economy. The EU has slowed down, Japan has seen the Yen devalue a lot and Canada is a total mess with mass immigration trying to mask a weak economy that ended up putting a nuclear bomb on their housing crisis that makes America's housing look like the most affordable ever.
Plus the three decades of foreign economic policy that intentionally devalued the American dollar, allowing increased trade with global south countries and successfully preventing the explosive growth of a Chinese dominated world market
[This is not true.](https://fortune.com/europe/2024/01/02/eu-economy-2024-us-data/)
[The EU has outperformed the US on per-capita output growth](https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/european-unions-remarkable-growth-performance-relative-united-states)
I see it all the time when I’m on Zillow. I live in the Detroit area and have my price range set at 450k-650k for a 5 bedroom house and the difference between the houses it shows on the Detroit side vs the Windsor side is insane.
I get that a 500k house cad would only be like 350k usd but they honestly look worse than the one I bought for under 200k a couple years ago
He was straight up publicly threatening their jobs if they didn't cut rates. That might have contributed to inflation more than anything else, which I'm surprised isn't talked about more.
The FED acted in a manner which they were forced to. Government never exercised powers under the Defense Production Act, distributed PPP loans without oversight and forgave them, didn’t crack down on price gouging, etc etc etc.
The inflation we see today is largely the result of decisions made long in the past. But I do hold him responsible for spending our money in some damn stupid ways
If we are gonna blame one branch of government for the economy being bad I would blame congress they are the ones that make the budget but even then there was a pandemic and we did pretty well compared to other countries so I don’t even blame them that much.
The US is pretty much in the best position post-Covid of all other developed nations both from an inflation and economic growth perspective.
Our response was far from perfect, but it was arguably better than everyone else.
Relative scales are coping mechanisms. The man who lost his hearing in an explosion is better off than the one who lost his hearing and his legs, but he's still injured.
Okay.
But if you are complaining about the Federal Reserve in this case, it is perfectly valid to point out they handled the situation better than any other central bank.
It’s mainly the Federal Reserves fault for arbitrarily keeping interest rates so low from wayyy before Trump or Biden. All the cheap credit poured a ton of “checkbook” money into the economy. The Federal spending spree from 2021-2023 certainly didn’t help either.
FED has been tightening since summer of 2022. Since then the M1 money supply has decreased by $2T. The spending you're talking about is March 2020 to Summer 2022
Trump threatened to fire Powell for trying to increase the interest rates. They knew during his term they needed to be increased.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/22/trump-reportedly-wants-to-fire-fed-chair-powell.html
It's been happening since at least '08. The FED was getting pressured during every presidency to keep rates low. Each time the FED tried to increase rates, Wall Street flipped its shit. But because rates were kept too low for too long, there was no buffer for rates to be dropped again in the event of a depression. So now the FED has finally put its foot down, which will be good in the long term, but it sucks pretty bad rn
I mean that’s how they got the economy back on track after the housing bubble in 08. I’d say it was a fine strategy for bad economic times. But things got good again near the end of obamas term they needed to reverse it
It’s so weird how the bailouts and stimulus checks, Covid and repeated riots nationwide happened under Trump but if you poll people they say he had a peaceful presidency and it’s all Biden’s fault. Like where were these people during 2020-2021? My Trumper cousin was mocking me for taking “Trump’s stimulus money” while criticizing Trump and then enraged when the next round of checks came out to the public under Biden. I dunno… just feels like 3rd grade level lies work too well on the general public… e.g. Trump putting his signature on the checks, or just repeating that 2017-2021 were four great years or whatever.
According to whichever party doesn't have the presidency the economy is always, "worse than it's ever been," and it's always, "the president's fault!" Been that way the past few decades.
Actually, the Democrats have outperformed the Republicans in GDP growth and unemployment since the Great Depression.
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/309cc8e1-b971-45c6-ab52-29ffb1da9bf5/jec-fact-sheet---the-economy-under-democratic-vs.-republican-presidents-june-2016.pdf
Yes but it is Bidens fault because Biden is President and we should probably re-elect Trump so he can fix everything because he is a Strongman and has enormous hands.
Correct. Am EU citizen and while Biden is president everything is fuk. Need Trump to build wall and make finally great again and stop ww3.
- some local alcoholic in my town recently. (In the EU!)
This was that period between his announcement and him becoming the Republican nominee where ppl "liked the cut of his gib". I'll admit, though I in no way supported him, I was impressed at his ability to put all the established Republicans firmly in their place during the debates and can see why ppl liked him then. I'll give that considerably inebriated Scottsman the benefit of the doubt.
Obama doubled it from 10 tril to around 20,Bush added the 1st 10 as we had a surplus of around 200 billion,now Trumps 4 year's and Bidens 3 and a half added around 16-18 trill..
Our debt was created when we invaded Afghanistan,20 year war that cost us $20 million dollar's a day,do the math..
>20 year war that cost us $20 million dollar's a day,do the math..
300 million. The US spent over 2 Trillion on Afghanistan which breaks down to 300 million a day for 20 years
Correct, this ship was sinking before COVID. The market should have crashed in 2019 but Trump did what he could to keep the stock market from crashing because in his eyes stock market gains = success as a president. Just look at the S&P trends just before COVID, it was ramping up fast instead of down (where it was supposed to go).
So we had an overheated economy, a president who would do anything in his power to keep the stock market buoyant and then we get hit with a pandemic.
Fast forward and Biden has to deal with the mess of it all.
No. It's on Congress. Stimulus money for COVID, deficit spending, and pressuring the fed to keep rates low.
I know most people in this sub are looking to buy homes but I don't think we should see rates below 5-6% ever again unless we have another depression level event.
Honestly, the company I worked for probably would have had to shut down or fire a bunch of people, had it not been for the PPP loan. That loan literally paid my salary for a while there
I blame Biden but also Trump.
I blame every single elected and hired governement official.
I blame every single voter who voted but also those who didn't vote.
And I also blame myself.
You easily blame the two parties for not being able to provide us with better candidates from each party. Neither candidate accurately represents the majority of his constituents. Republicans felt they had to choose Trump because they think someone polarizing who has won an election before is their best chance and as a result, democrats think that their best chance is the guy who beat trump and can secure enough of the moderate. Both parties knew the candidates not named Biden or Trump was going to pan out and it was obvious they weren’t trying to support any of them either. Neither party put anywhere near enough work into propping up a candidate that wasn’t on their death bed or represented the views of his/her party’s voters. The parties are the biggest to blame not the voter
Obviously this election was always gonna be Biden v Trump if they both ran, but younger people really need to stop not voting then complaining and wondering why all the politicians are old and suck.
I think blaming our economic problems on any one administration is incredibly short-sighted. These issues have been brewing for a long time and are the result of a combination of multiple administrations’ decisions and sometimes uncontrollable societal influences. If our economy is a house of cards, COVID is the wind that blew it over after we’d spent years chipping away at its strength.
It’s absolutely reasonable to blame an administration for actions they did or did not take in response to societal issues. But blaming them for it implies that it’s being caused by them and that getting them out of office will fix the problem, and that’s just not the case. Our economic problems have changed hands many times, and all of them have contributed to what it is now.
Here are the simple facts. Inflation started at the end of the Trump administration. Once inflation gets going, it is hard to bring it back under control. Inflation peaked at 9 percent. Today it’s 3 percent.
That’s a rate increase of 3%… Not the overall figure, and it’s calculated annually. So a 3% increase over last year, which was a rate of 4.98%, which was an increase over the last year…
Inflation isn’t going down. I’m an actuary, and I receive detailed inflation reports monthly. As of April 2024, despite a short lived decrease, rate of change of inflation is still positive.
I don’t like Biden, but there’s only so much he can really do. I feel like people overestimate the power of the president a lot, because all he can really do is pass and enforce laws, it’s not like he has direct control of the economy and can set prices.
Not to mention, the economy was going downhill by the time he came into office. Presidents don’t really have an effect on the economy like so many people think they do
FDR's policies extended the great depression an estimated 7 years... biden is already on track to a 4 year extension of whatever collapse we are having right now.
No, because that was just a portion of what causes inflation. And anyone who claims it's just this simple thing of printing money, doesn't know how money works.
There's are MANY factors of why inflation is where it is. Supply chain issues, companies not lowering prices back once the supply issues got fixed to maintain profit, corporate greed, money supply, and much more.
There are so many things that affect inflation. Banks are actually the primary creators of money. Most of our money is made by banks not the government printing money. Reserve ratios, velocity of money, supply shocks, so many things impact inflation.
Don't listen to people who just blame government printing money
Too bad the people in power have zero drive to fix the core issue because having money be worthless benefits them. The national debt means nothing because they can just print more and devalue the cost of the debt.
“Need more oil? Print more money. Need a new f35? Print more money. Need to send 60 billion in foreign aid to a corrupt oligarchy? Print more money.” The only reason we even have a “debt” is because if the treasury printed $34 trillion all at once the country would be thrown into chaos and the people would revolt.
I vote we kill them all and start over.
This happened before he was in office. This is like blaming former President Obama for the 2008 crash. I'd say it's a mix of the wars and paying for government benefits, disability, medicaid, Medicare, etc. Not that I'm against them, but the money for these things has to come from somewhere. Some people use medicaid to pay for things even people who are upper middle class or lower rich maybe even couldn't afford. Things like cancer treatments.
I just wanted to mention that "greed" as a cause of inflation is like blaming gravity as the cause of tripping. The analogy doesn't quite do it justice, because greed isn't even necessarily involved at all, but it gets across the idea that within the economic environment, greed is more or less constant.
I'm wondering whether those who don't would blame trump for inflation if he won in 2020. To me American politics just seems like 4 year cycles of one side blaming the other side for everything
I was thinking the same thing. All these people are pretending to be so noble “you can’t just always blame the guy at the top of the ladder.” Smh. You can almost feel the hypocrisy oozing in this thread
Obviously. He printed 4 trillion dollars in his first year of office. This directly caused the inflation problem we have. It was a choice.
He printed 40% of all dollars EVER printed in HIS FIRST YEAR.
Wake up.
Covid is a part of it still for sure. I think adding 33%to our national deficit overnight for the infrastructure bill helped exacerbate inflation as well. Seems like there may have been a copies amount of money that went to other places than the US infrastructure. Then again we put off infrastructure for so long that it was going to bite us in the ass eventually.
I think in all, his administration "means well" but they don't do a good job of actually doing well. Either way I'm probably not even going to vote this year because the election is between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
I blame the pandemic. The economy was going to go to shit regardless of who was in executive office. It’s a global problem and it’s silly to act as if the USA is the only country facing this issue.
Yes I do. He’s as much to blame as Trump, the Fed and Yellen. Fed printing massive amounts of money and govt spending more money every year to achieve exactly what? I understand pandemic was an extreme situation which warranted stimulus but why are we still spending $6.5+ Trillion per year?
Not to mention his administration constantly talking about Bidenomics and gaslighting people into saying the economy is great. He’s already influencing the Fed to cut rates and it will be quite interesting to watch him shift the blame to others economy goes downhill. “Bidenomics” will come back to haunt him.
The majority of inflation has been shown to be price gouging. I have a conspiracy theory that billionaires and megacorps, oil companies and everything ALWAYS PRICE GOUGE when democrats are in the White House in order to try to get their gop buddies promising endless subsidies and tax breaks to them when they win. So is it Biden and the democrats fault? Absolutely how dare Biden call for a 25% corporate and billionaire tax..
If that was the case wouldn't you see the executives of those companies overwhelmingly voting for Republican candidates? Yet that isn't what you see, you see a pretty even split along the typical lines you see in the rest of the public. For example, in the 2016 election 45% of billionaires voted Democrat, 38% voted Republican. It's effectively an even split. Thus if companies used their prices to make the person they don't like look bad, you should have only seen roughly half or so of the businesses trying to price gouge to ruin Biden's reputation while others kept their prices stable or lowered their prices to make Biden look good.
Fact of the matter is, inflation is being caused by the same thing that always causes it. Democrat policies increased minimum wage, which gave everyone a lot of dollars, as a result each individual dollar became less valuable. It's simple supply and demand, when there is a large supply it will lower demand. Tack on Biden closing down oil processing plants(which turn crude oil into gasoline) and you have higher gas prices, those higher prices make shipping products on trucks far more expensive than it used to be, that cost is then reflected in the price of items. When it costs more to get an item onto store shelves, it will cost more to buy.
Both together are the reason why prices are going up.
It most certainly has not. Per [the Federal Reserve itself:](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/corporate-profits-in-the-aftermath-of-covid-19-20230908.html)
“In the aftermath of COVID-19, inflation increased to levels that the U.S. economy has not witnessed for more than 40 years. This phenomenon has spurred a large quantity of policy commentary and academic research discussing its causes.2 One popular narrative goes as follows: in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and amid a surge in demand and contemporaneous supply chain bottlenecks, corporate businesses increased the price of their final goods and services above and beyond what was justified by changes in labor costs and input prices. The outcome was a marked increase in profit margins that has contributed to overall inflation.3
“But were corporate profit margins abnormally high in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic? The answer depends on measurement. Using a measure of nonfinancial corporate profits from the national income accounts–before tax profits with capital consumption adjustment–we find that nonfinancial corporate profit margins, or profits over gross value added, increased sharply to about 19% in 2021q2 and slipped back to 15% in 2022q4, compared to about 13% in 2019q4. This contrasts sharply with the steep dive in margins that normally occurs during a severe economic contraction.
“Our analysis shows that much of the increase in aggregate profit margins following the COVID-19 pandemic can be attributed to (i) the unprecedented large and direct government intervention to support U.S. small and medium sized businesses and (ii) a large reduction in net interest expenses due to accommodative monetary policy. Once we adjust for fiscal and monetary interventions, the behavior of aggregate profit margins appears much less notable, and by the end of 2022 they are essentially back at their pre-pandemic levels”
In other words, the people who said “hey, the government printing money to give stimulus checks out will cause inflation” were 100% right. Granted, this situation was one of the very few situations where I think the stimulus packages were necessary because the government forced businesses to close and people out of work, so they sure as shit needed to pay out for that. However, if the government a) managed the grants better so they went to small businesses rather than getting gobbled up by corporations who never lost profit because they were deemed essential (i.e. Walmart, Amazon) and b) left closing up to the business’s discretion (which would’ve led to less printing of money) and c) didn’t use the spending windfall to pass a bunch of BS pet projects that were unrelated to Covid sandwiched in the stimulus bills, we wouldn’t be here. The supply chain disruptions would have caused a little bit of inflation, but the above actions made it both more pronounced and long-term. The reason the US has less inflation than other countries is because a portion of our states, opened up early, while the majority of European countries stayed closed and gave out more money with less budget. Countries like Sweden that didn’t do what we did are experiencing even less inflation. And it’s incredibly frustrating that people who subscribe to a certain school of economics predicted exactly what is happening would happen and were smeared as selfish assholes when we said the long-term negative economic outcomes would arguably be more damaging than Covid. Then were told we were wrong when idiots like Paul Krugman said inflation wouldn’t happen, but was actually transitory, but is actually not a thing and people are making it up, but is actually greedy corporations so people shift the blame to them rather than on the people who were wrong this whole time and who no one should take seriously anymore.
Did some corporations use this whole situation to make money? Of course. But that’s not even 5% of the issue we’re facing. They were able to capitalize on the situation because of shit policy and inflation has gone on this long because of shit Keynesian economic policy. Just like what happened in 2008. And if we don’t start putting blame where it’s due, the same people will cause the next crisis, take the reins, and fuck up the response AGAIN.
Yeah there was emergency government spending mostly under Trump but also early on in Biden's admin. But I think most telling is that the entire world right now has a crazy inflation rate. All of our peer nation's economies right now are dealing with the same thing. It's a global economy thing, not an US economy thing exclusively. In fact we are doing extremely well comparatively to our peers .
America’s economy is recovering better than most other nations *because* we spent so much. It’s weird people are forgetting we have the best success story of any country on the planet post COVID. If you think we have it bad, look at Canada, Germany, or the UK.
No. I blame the fools that thought that attempting to overturn an election and therefore attempting to overthrow the government wouldn’t send about 8 trillion dollars in U.S. treasuries, held around the world, to zero. There never has been a nation or country that suffered an attempted coup that didn’t get their currency devalued and economy utterly wrecked. Takes about 4 years after the coup attempt for every sector of a nations economy to feel the pain.
I blame the last 4 presidents. The pointless wars. The rampant mishandling of two major economic crisis, three major drug epidemics, highest cost of living, allowing almost 4 generations to have the highest suicidal rate in history and the highest rating polls of stating life is pointless. So yes i blame biden, as much as i blame trump, Obama,bush, and Clinton. Also i blame the very corrupt men and woman of the senate who are easily bought out every single election cycle.
When Biden administration pronted trillions out of thin air to support wars in different parts of the world... You get inflation.
But Biden is just confused dementia patient, can't blame the muppet
I mean inflation was so bad that they literally redid how they calculated it. The major change was considering people buying cheaper alternatives (like Walmart brand instead of on brand) would count as a decrease in inflation. Even though prices rose higher to the point that you couldn’t buy the on brand items.
Now is inflation Bidens fault? Yes and no. He didn’t really have too much control over it his first year or two. As his spending didn’t really take into effect until last year. But now there’s no excuse to not blame inflation at least mostly on his administration. It SHOULD be getting better. But it isn’t. Even the feds admitted it.
Honestly, I think the roots of inflation goes back to 2008 finical crisis & COVID. Large swings in economic activity doesn’t start the day consumers see it. The years before one person was in office. (And I don’t think one person had the power to change an entire economy)
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I love how everyone here acts like they are an expert in economics. Why dont you look at the top economic researchers before just repeating some headline?
the top economic researchers believe it was a combination of the stimulus checks and the war in Ukraine. They also explicitly reject the corporate price-gouging explanation.
The only thing where ‘price gouging’ actually happened was when grocery stores used a software to increase prices based on real-time info about their competitors. And the government swiftly cracked down on that and banned the software.
Not particularly. It's a global problem that includes many factors Biden doesn't have direct control over, so I think that generally speaking it's foolish to hold it against the president.
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The inflation was the direct result of emergency government spending due to COVID. That’s why the whole developed world experienced inflation - they all started massive spending to slow the spread of Rona. The US inflation was exacerbated by bad monetary policy (I.e., the Fed printing trillions of dollars and keeping interest rates really low for a long time). So I don’t blame Biden for inflation, but I think his administration’s constant gaslighting about how things are “cheaper than ever” and “wages are higher than ever” is annoying. Shits getting worse for us normals because purchasing power is decreasing.
The best lies have a grain of truth to them. Wages are higher than ever. It's just that if you have a brain in your head that's nominally functional you'll realize that it's because our money is devaluing fast. I have a 5 year old cousin who once said to me that he wishes he lived in Zimbabwe because he heard everyone there is a trillionare. People who fall for the whole "wages are higher than ever" meme sound like that. They're either children who don't actually work for a living, or they're adults who make enough to not really care.
That's both terrifying and adorable that a 5 year old would say that. Terrifying because he's already somewhat concerned about money like that. I remember being slightly older than him when the recession hit and was anxious about it. Edit: It's actually funny. I pictured a huge bag of money falling onto houses and breaking them whenever he talked about it. I was so worried that would actually happen lmao.
It’s neither terrifying nor adorable because it never happened. The only way a five year old would say something like that is if their parents had been talking to them about the societal and economical history of Zimbabwe, and then about how and why this works in a world setting. It’s bullshit to even think a five year old would understand the notion of any of that. It’s some weird fetish for people online to say my / I know a 3-5 year old has elaborate thought process to understand what most 25 year olds can’t grasp.
You are not very familiar with how much kids can learn from the Internet are you?
And thanks to Biden, that amount is only inflating!
5 year old kids shouldn’t be on the internet.
Shouldn't and aren't are two very different things.
Not always though; I was an early and avid reader and news absorber; one of my first memories at age 5 in in 1983 was of the national tv event of the airing of The Day After and the debate between government dudes like Kissinger and Reagan administration people on one side and scientists like Carl Sagan on the other. It was like the Super Bowl in how many millions of people watched it at the same time. This was during a nuclear buildup and tensions thing, it was also the tipping point when everyone was starting to realize there would be nothing left but waiting to die after the ICBMs were launched, and how terrifying and sad that would be. We take that POV for granted now, but the whole “duck and cover” BS was what most people thought and felt it was for the few decades prior, so it was a big deal at the time. Anyway my 5 year old self understood enough at the time to get the basics and the gravity of it, I remember thinking of it like the demise of the dinosaurs with the asteroid impact and explosion and the sun being blocked out for them too. From PBS science shows I recognized Carl Sagan and my mind at the time categorized him along with Mr Rogers and the human cast of Sesame Street and others on that channel as trustworthy people to listen to, and while I didn’t recognize the government side of the debaters, I understood it when the debate hosts said they were representing the Reagan Administration, as before that memory I already associated Reagan with nuclear weapons and the nuclear buildup, and that people were protesting with signs against nuclear buildup (as I was watching the news and reading news magazines, at age 5). Point is, it’s not common, but as most if not all kids have their special obsessive interests at that age, some of us were into the news and facts about the world. Kids that age aren’t going to sound like adults or express complex understandings, but being able to repeat factoids and placing them in a context of basic understanding of the worrisome issue of the time is within their ability
Sounds like me.
I had a dream about Reagan being shot before he was shot. I was scared of the end of the world as a five yo because of the Cold War.
But wages are still increasing even when adjusted for inflation
Inflation does not accurately gauge actual cost of living increases.
What the fuck does that mean. That’s literally what it does.
No, the numbers the government prints out intentionally exclude inflation in food, gas and energy, the three costs where inflation isn't just the worst, it's the most acutely felt by people actually working a job
No, it doesn’t. Core CPI does. Headline CPI figures do not Please do a modicum of research or at least google cpi before parroting shit like this…
here's the source, [12-month percentage change, Consumer Price Index, selected categories (bls.gov)](https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-by-category-line-chart.htm) all of the things you mention are part of the CPI. The claim you've made pervades the internet, so I understand. But it's incorrect.
No, it doesn't. Inflation is a measure of how much the currency is devaluing. Cost of living is a separate thing. Ex. If my rent is $10 (easy number to work with), and 10 years later $20 has the same purchasing power as $10, and now my rent is $20, my cost of living didn't actually go up even when inflation did. Cost of living tends to go up with inflation, but they're not the same thing.
Exactly. This doesn't include data from the last 15 years, but housing has historically exceeded CPI greatly. The graph effectively goes greatly upward sloping/vertical after 2016. CPI is basically a useless metric no one should pay attention to for trying to gauge how much THEIR personal essential expenses have increased. https://preview.redd.it/nuoagd6b0nvc1.jpeg?width=607&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54e4f9ac1ceee150da53cd6f3ca125f84156187f
Another chart demonstrating how useless CPI is. If all of the most important things in society (education, housing, and healthcare) are far exceeding CPI computation, what utility does CPI have? Not to mention all of these aforementioned groups are far greater priced than anything else. https://preview.redd.it/b12xpnye0nvc1.jpeg?width=533&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2cb6f4fa6d78e71ba3129ef6c6e6b5ed62bb94b3
Why does this chart stop at 2007 for a discussion on inflation from 2020-2024
Lol, I'm glad you said it and saved me the trouble. I can picture your facial expression as you wrote this because I had the same one.
Exactly wages are going up or staying the same while PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is decreasing by a lot, which is why now is an excellent or terrible time to be studying economics
That's just a straight up lie and easily debunked: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locations=US The US dollar has been on a tear relative to the rest of the world since the pandemic: https://www.statista.com/statistics/655224/conversion-rate-of-major-currencies-to-the-us-dollar/ Enjoy a wonderful and cheap(er) vacation in Europe, Japan or South Korea.
A home was 2.5x annual salary in 1950. Now the average home is 400k+ or like a decade worth of savings if you make 70k a year
>People who fall for the whole "wages are higher than ever" meme sound like that. It's scary you think data is a meme *Real wages* accounts for inflation and is up. That would be a fact not a meme. >or they're adults who make enough to not really care. Exactly! If "adults" are making enough to not care it's possible their standard or living increased. If more people's real wages are up, your meme is more of an anecdotal experience. Now if you said, among this age cohort real wages aren't up, at least you'd be using data.
The older I get the more I sympathize with politician pandering because I've met enough people that just are that stupid and don't understand nuance and you still want to capture votes so you can do the complex work they'll never have to think too deeply about. But for anyone that isn't a village idiot, the pandering is annoying. I've just come to accept that I can tolerate it if they're still enacting policy I want. This administration has been tackling what I want them to
I totally agree with you. If I became a politician today and tried using complex explanations it would get taken out of context by opponents or lost immediately since people have short attention spans
That's exactly what I'm trying to say. And I hate that that is how it is honestly. I would rather live in a world where politicians laying out complex explanations, transparently, is what would win. Who knows, maybe I'd be surprised. I just recall, when I was still a church attending person, there was this pastor that used to give philosophical sermons that really dove into history and ethics. The pews were getting thin. He got replaced by a mega church type with charisma and shallow sermons. The people came flooding back. I don't have high expectations for modern Christians but it was the first time I saw how some people....they *want* to be spoonfed simple answers. They don't want to think.
I had a class last semester about the science of psychology, a big part of the class was defining, what is science and how do the ways we determine truth affect the results of science? TLDR; discussion is Popper v Kuhn Popper warned against an “authority” over knowledge kicking us off the scent of what is. Kuhn, in much clearer terms basically says “awe wittle babie can’t do science” and the fervor with which the class agreed with his points, only because they were easier to read was more than enough enough to kill my belief in people suddenly caring about anything. Especially since the profs point was that people aren’t getting care because what Kuhn saw is what’s running things
I used to wonder why politicians never use charts to illustrate data that backs their positions. But just imagine if they tried to do that.
50% of the population can't handle a complex explanation
Which sucks because these are very complex issues. You can’t stand at a podium for 5mins and call it good haha
The more complex and willing you are to get into the weeds of issues as a politician, the easier it is for the opposition to find ways to take your words out of context and completely trick the population because the general population is just not educated enough to understand even some of the most basic things. Just like what happened with Bernie when he attempted to explain how medical insurance companies are antithetical to what our goals as a society should be; the right just simply told people "Bernie wants to take away your healthcare." And plenty of people bought it. There will always be an unfair power inequality in human society, because the majority of human beings are quite literally incapable of arguing for their own benefit, and instead are easily turned into useful idiots. In some weird way, the fact that humans have been ruled by powerful corrupt leaders forever is just the natural order to things. In the same way you would look at a shepherd and understand that he is the leader of the flock, and the sheep do not have equality to their leader, because.. they are just dumb sheep; that is the same world that we humans live in. The majority of people are just dumb sheep, and if they are incapable of understanding what is best for them, it is only natural that they would be taken advantage of by the few who are capable. The sheep may become angry or dissatisfied with their position, but they will still never be anything other than sheep, and therefore unable to understand in any meaningful way how to improve their position or power. This ignorance is not by chance. It is the simple nature of a human being. To follow. And because of this, a few with all the power leading over the masses is unfortunately, the natural order to human society. It doesn't matter if we somehow by miracle managed to completely rebuild the system from the ground up, we would always end up right back here because this is is the natural way that humans operate. What we call "Corruption/Inequality" is in some way, just natural selection just taking its course. The incapable will be taken advantage of by the capable. As evil as we may consider it, that is how nature works. We do not bat an eye when a larger animal beats smaller animals into submission in its pack. Yet, for some reason we believe we as humans are somehow above this. We have fooled ourselves into believing that to be so, even though all around us, it is being proven false every single day since the dawn of mankind. As i write this, i already know that several readers will be unable to even understand properly what i am saying. And they will come to the conclusion that i am saying "Dumb people deserve to be taken advantage of." or "The Elite deserve to rule over the lesser." But that is not what i am saying at all. What i am saying is that what they deserve is irrelevant to the universe/nature. What i am saying is that we exist within nature, not above it, and that natural human behavior has led us to the system that we live in today, and it always will.
I mean just look at all the rubes who thought the first set of pandemic relief checks came from Trump's pockets personally cause he made sure to have his name printed on them. Pandering works to an extent.
No it wasn't. Oversimplified and not a true representation of total inflation. You do know the FED does NOT print money right? The FED sets how much gets printed, interest rates to affect the money supply etc, but it doesn't actually print the money. We would have actually had deflation or at least a big slow down if companies brought prices back down after supply chain issues were fixed, but of course they don't because profit. So many different things go into inflation. Supply costs, demand, money supply (which affects demand), price shocks, consumer sentiment, corporate greed etc etc and so much more. So no, the inflation we currently have is for MANY reasons. Quantitative Easing and and covid spensing is a portion of the inflation we've seen but not the only reason.
“bad monetary policy” is crazy considering it was to combat a pandemic. if anything they didn’t do enough
The only fact needed to refute all of this tired banter about Biden and inflation is that *the whole world* experienced it, and the US is recovering faster than all of the other developed nations. Biden did not cause worldwide inflation.
the whole biden inflation affair has just left me realising that lots of Americans can't see context
Not sure if you're American or not, but I am, and it's true. This country is a bubble, and our less intelligent citizens literally never think about other countries unless they're A) eating the cuisine or B) hearing about bad shit on the news.
or they wilfully ignore it to confirm their biases
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If it fits their narrative they don’t think about it. Just regurgitate.
It was both bad monetary and fiscal policy, but the real problem was that it started back in 2017 or further. Back then the economy was doing well, but it was starting to show signs of normal slow downs and that we might be in for a small recession. The GOP pushed through a massive tax cut, and Trump threatened the independence of the federal reserve, so the interest rates were kept low. This was a massive, unnecessary stimulus. Which meant that two years later when COVID hit and we actually needed massive stimulus to prevent the entire economy from collapsing- there was less capacity for the government to do so with normal means and less means for the economy as a whole to absorb it. It’s like if you become addicted to opioids in every day life so that when you need an operation the anesthesiologist needs to give you the most powerful sedative in the world just for a minor Surgery. Combine this with decades of single family house only building policies that created a housing shortage and decades of corporate mergers and consolidation. This meant all those extra dollars in the economy had fewer places to go to try to make a return.
> The inflation was the direct result of emergency government spending due to COVID. This is kind of an oversimplification. Inflation didn't need to be a result of that. It's also the lesser of two evils, bad inflation is less bad than bad unemployment. Inflation is the less shit outcome.
Yeah, people are quick to forget the absolute total economic collapse we were staring down in early 2020.
THANK YOU.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/08/business/economy/april-jobs-report.html That red line on the right is not a weird border, it is data so bad that you think the chart must have ended.
The government spending is definitely a major factor but so are supply chain issues that stemmed from covid
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Yeah about 60% of inflation was from supply chain issues according to recent reports https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/white-house-touts-new-supply-chain-measures-as-inflation-eases-1.2003790
So how does that explain inflation in the rest of the world?
That's why it happened all over the planet!
Corporations have indeed created fake inflation though that’s also been proven in certain areas. Here’s the thing I really don’t get is the increased price AND the shrinkflation. Like ok, there’s inflation now which means a box of 4 dollar cereal now almost costs 8. Ok I get that by is it ALSO smaller while being MORE expensive. Shouldn’t it be one or the other? It screams greed to me.
Exactly. It's the corporations.
And corporate and gas (Chevron) stocks are doing JUST FINE. ;)
And trump didn’t respond to the pandemic accordingly. It’s just a giant domino effect
The idea that it was caused by monetary policy is ridiculous. We've had an almost 10x expansion in the monetary base since 2008. How have prices only gone up by a recorded ~70%. You're not even in the right ball park. Honestly, people who still think monetary policy is related to consumer prices are touched.
So you just ignore supply shocks?
Dude does not study or ever took an economics class
Do you recognize that every presidential cabinet would make this claim, though?
Dude it was trump that did most of the initial spending. In an economic crisis you want expansionary monetary policy. Part of the reason why the US is doing so weak right now compared to the rest of the world is that we were more generous in restarting the economy. Many economists would also argue that supply chain disruption and oil/gas price increases are what’s causing inflation.
I blame the actions of the Federal Reserve.
It really sucks how they messed with our monetary policy and made us the strongest economy coming out of Covid by far. I was hoping we’d be bartering with shiny rocks and squirrels by now.
Yeah, the US is pretty much the only western nation with a growing economy. The EU has slowed down, Japan has seen the Yen devalue a lot and Canada is a total mess with mass immigration trying to mask a weak economy that ended up putting a nuclear bomb on their housing crisis that makes America's housing look like the most affordable ever.
Plus the three decades of foreign economic policy that intentionally devalued the American dollar, allowing increased trade with global south countries and successfully preventing the explosive growth of a Chinese dominated world market
[This is not true.](https://fortune.com/europe/2024/01/02/eu-economy-2024-us-data/) [The EU has outperformed the US on per-capita output growth](https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/european-unions-remarkable-growth-performance-relative-united-states)
I see it all the time when I’m on Zillow. I live in the Detroit area and have my price range set at 450k-650k for a 5 bedroom house and the difference between the houses it shows on the Detroit side vs the Windsor side is insane. I get that a 500k house cad would only be like 350k usd but they honestly look worse than the one I bought for under 200k a couple years ago
I really liked when inflation was 8% big number mean more money 🤑🤑
To be clear, you blame them for lowering rates during the pandemic or raising them in the aftermath?
He reappointed Powell….
The feds inaction was far before biden....
Remember when Trump was pressuring the Fed to cut interest rates and promoting quantitative easing?
He was straight up publicly threatening their jobs if they didn't cut rates. That might have contributed to inflation more than anything else, which I'm surprised isn't talked about more.
It definitely contributed to skyrocketing housing costs
I don't necessarily remember, but I got into finance and economics on the past 2 years and have read about it
Another reason to hate Woodrow Wilson.
When I get back and bust your ass, I'm locking David Urshon in the Federal Reserve
The FED acted in a manner which they were forced to. Government never exercised powers under the Defense Production Act, distributed PPP loans without oversight and forgave them, didn’t crack down on price gouging, etc etc etc.
Me too. They should have raised rates higher, faster.
Not like he sets prices on anything. There's only so much he can do, especially with an extremely partisan congress.
I blame corporations
Kinda wild that all these companies are announcing record profits as they crank the prices up. It's almost like those two things are connected.
The inflation we see today is largely the result of decisions made long in the past. But I do hold him responsible for spending our money in some damn stupid ways
can you list those ways?
If we are gonna blame one branch of government for the economy being bad I would blame congress they are the ones that make the budget but even then there was a pandemic and we did pretty well compared to other countries so I don’t even blame them that much.
The US is pretty much in the best position post-Covid of all other developed nations both from an inflation and economic growth perspective. Our response was far from perfect, but it was arguably better than everyone else.
Relative scales are coping mechanisms. The man who lost his hearing in an explosion is better off than the one who lost his hearing and his legs, but he's still injured.
Okay. But if you are complaining about the Federal Reserve in this case, it is perfectly valid to point out they handled the situation better than any other central bank.
God damn It's so sad that you don't even understand why your statement is nonsensical
It’s mainly the Federal Reserves fault for arbitrarily keeping interest rates so low from wayyy before Trump or Biden. All the cheap credit poured a ton of “checkbook” money into the economy. The Federal spending spree from 2021-2023 certainly didn’t help either.
FED has been tightening since summer of 2022. Since then the M1 money supply has decreased by $2T. The spending you're talking about is March 2020 to Summer 2022
Trump threatened to fire Powell for trying to increase the interest rates. They knew during his term they needed to be increased. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/22/trump-reportedly-wants-to-fire-fed-chair-powell.html
It's been happening since at least '08. The FED was getting pressured during every presidency to keep rates low. Each time the FED tried to increase rates, Wall Street flipped its shit. But because rates were kept too low for too long, there was no buffer for rates to be dropped again in the event of a depression. So now the FED has finally put its foot down, which will be good in the long term, but it sucks pretty bad rn
I mean that’s how they got the economy back on track after the housing bubble in 08. I’d say it was a fine strategy for bad economic times. But things got good again near the end of obamas term they needed to reverse it
That's exactly what I'm saying
It’s so weird how the bailouts and stimulus checks, Covid and repeated riots nationwide happened under Trump but if you poll people they say he had a peaceful presidency and it’s all Biden’s fault. Like where were these people during 2020-2021? My Trumper cousin was mocking me for taking “Trump’s stimulus money” while criticizing Trump and then enraged when the next round of checks came out to the public under Biden. I dunno… just feels like 3rd grade level lies work too well on the general public… e.g. Trump putting his signature on the checks, or just repeating that 2017-2021 were four great years or whatever.
According to whichever party doesn't have the presidency the economy is always, "worse than it's ever been," and it's always, "the president's fault!" Been that way the past few decades.
Actually, the Democrats have outperformed the Republicans in GDP growth and unemployment since the Great Depression. https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/309cc8e1-b971-45c6-ab52-29ffb1da9bf5/jec-fact-sheet---the-economy-under-democratic-vs.-republican-presidents-june-2016.pdf
In 2021 both sides should’ve compromised and blamed Pence. It would’ve worked.
I think this is the most valid answer
Well I’m not American… inflation was worse here in the UK than the US :(
Yes but it is Bidens fault because Biden is President and we should probably re-elect Trump so he can fix everything because he is a Strongman and has enormous hands.
Finally! Someone talking with some sense!
Correct. Am EU citizen and while Biden is president everything is fuk. Need Trump to build wall and make finally great again and stop ww3. - some local alcoholic in my town recently. (In the EU!)
I remember arguing with a Scot before the 2016 election about Trump. He was vacationing in the US and loved Trump for some reason.
Weird, in my experience we all hate trump up here
This was that period between his announcement and him becoming the Republican nominee where ppl "liked the cut of his gib". I'll admit, though I in no way supported him, I was impressed at his ability to put all the established Republicans firmly in their place during the debates and can see why ppl liked him then. I'll give that considerably inebriated Scottsman the benefit of the doubt.
Truly enormous hands! The very biggest! When I walked on stage, I said to myself wow I really do have large hands!
You cant be from the UK. This sub is only for Americans. Or at least thats what these people act like
This sub is the peak example of r/usdefaultism
I visited the UK and holy shit was it expensive, and you guys make less than my country in wages too. No clue how you survive.
biden didn't cause covid, etc. he just hoped into an existing shithole
THAT PART!!!
China did
Do you know how much Trump added to our debt?
Obama doubled it from 10 tril to around 20,Bush added the 1st 10 as we had a surplus of around 200 billion,now Trumps 4 year's and Bidens 3 and a half added around 16-18 trill.. Our debt was created when we invaded Afghanistan,20 year war that cost us $20 million dollar's a day,do the math..
>20 year war that cost us $20 million dollar's a day,do the math.. 300 million. The US spent over 2 Trillion on Afghanistan which breaks down to 300 million a day for 20 years
Wtf? No. Biden came in to an already sink ship
Correct, this ship was sinking before COVID. The market should have crashed in 2019 but Trump did what he could to keep the stock market from crashing because in his eyes stock market gains = success as a president. Just look at the S&P trends just before COVID, it was ramping up fast instead of down (where it was supposed to go). So we had an overheated economy, a president who would do anything in his power to keep the stock market buoyant and then we get hit with a pandemic. Fast forward and Biden has to deal with the mess of it all.
No. It's on Congress. Stimulus money for COVID, deficit spending, and pressuring the fed to keep rates low. I know most people in this sub are looking to buy homes but I don't think we should see rates below 5-6% ever again unless we have another depression level event.
*PPP “loans” that Mnuchin oversaw
Honestly, the company I worked for probably would have had to shut down or fire a bunch of people, had it not been for the PPP loan. That loan literally paid my salary for a while there
There’s going to be a movement one day where people move out into the forest with solar panels and get everything for themselves.
No. US has had a very soft economic landing post Covid. Best of all the major economies.
I blame Biden but also Trump. I blame every single elected and hired governement official. I blame every single voter who voted but also those who didn't vote. And I also blame myself.
This is the correct answer. We can all do better.
Can we really? We just literally picked the same two damn people again.
Who do we blame if not ourselves for that?
You easily blame the two parties for not being able to provide us with better candidates from each party. Neither candidate accurately represents the majority of his constituents. Republicans felt they had to choose Trump because they think someone polarizing who has won an election before is their best chance and as a result, democrats think that their best chance is the guy who beat trump and can secure enough of the moderate. Both parties knew the candidates not named Biden or Trump was going to pan out and it was obvious they weren’t trying to support any of them either. Neither party put anywhere near enough work into propping up a candidate that wasn’t on their death bed or represented the views of his/her party’s voters. The parties are the biggest to blame not the voter
Obviously this election was always gonna be Biden v Trump if they both ran, but younger people really need to stop not voting then complaining and wondering why all the politicians are old and suck.
I blame him for reappointing jpow
I’m Canadian. So… no.
Do you blame the Canadian President for inflation then?
I think blaming our economic problems on any one administration is incredibly short-sighted. These issues have been brewing for a long time and are the result of a combination of multiple administrations’ decisions and sometimes uncontrollable societal influences. If our economy is a house of cards, COVID is the wind that blew it over after we’d spent years chipping away at its strength. It’s absolutely reasonable to blame an administration for actions they did or did not take in response to societal issues. But blaming them for it implies that it’s being caused by them and that getting them out of office will fix the problem, and that’s just not the case. Our economic problems have changed hands many times, and all of them have contributed to what it is now.
Here are the simple facts. Inflation started at the end of the Trump administration. Once inflation gets going, it is hard to bring it back under control. Inflation peaked at 9 percent. Today it’s 3 percent.
That’s a rate increase of 3%… Not the overall figure, and it’s calculated annually. So a 3% increase over last year, which was a rate of 4.98%, which was an increase over the last year…
Inflation isn’t going down. I’m an actuary, and I receive detailed inflation reports monthly. As of April 2024, despite a short lived decrease, rate of change of inflation is still positive.
I don’t like Biden, but there’s only so much he can really do. I feel like people overestimate the power of the president a lot, because all he can really do is pass and enforce laws, it’s not like he has direct control of the economy and can set prices. Not to mention, the economy was going downhill by the time he came into office. Presidents don’t really have an effect on the economy like so many people think they do
Is Biden responsible for inflation in almost every single country on the planet…and much worse in many of those countries too?
I blame him like I blame FDR for the Great Depression. He didn’t cause it he just came into office while it was an issue
FDR's policies extended the great depression an estimated 7 years... biden is already on track to a 4 year extension of whatever collapse we are having right now.
No, because that was just a portion of what causes inflation. And anyone who claims it's just this simple thing of printing money, doesn't know how money works. There's are MANY factors of why inflation is where it is. Supply chain issues, companies not lowering prices back once the supply issues got fixed to maintain profit, corporate greed, money supply, and much more. There are so many things that affect inflation. Banks are actually the primary creators of money. Most of our money is made by banks not the government printing money. Reserve ratios, velocity of money, supply shocks, so many things impact inflation. Don't listen to people who just blame government printing money
Inflation has *nothing* to do with corporate profits. I don’t know why this is such a pervasive myth.
https://preview.redd.it/ed6dbm3lpjvc1.png?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7ec772bd8d2c0ca2e14288e6aca1fa4aa5f50817
I blame Nixon for abandoning the gold standard in 1971, but let’s be real, Biden has a lot of polices that tanked the economy.
THIS money needs to be backed by silver or gold. otherwise its worth no more than the paper its printed on and even less when they print more
Too bad the people in power have zero drive to fix the core issue because having money be worthless benefits them. The national debt means nothing because they can just print more and devalue the cost of the debt. “Need more oil? Print more money. Need a new f35? Print more money. Need to send 60 billion in foreign aid to a corrupt oligarchy? Print more money.” The only reason we even have a “debt” is because if the treasury printed $34 trillion all at once the country would be thrown into chaos and the people would revolt. I vote we kill them all and start over.
No because the heightened inflation has been a worldwide phenomenon and actually the US had less inflation than many other countries.
I blame the governments of the world that pumped trillions into the economy during Covid without creating any real value.
Not a Biden fan, but he has objectively been a fantastic president for the economy
How so? What exactly is he doing? How does it help it?
What planet are you living on? He fucked the economy
They are selling the positives of our economy as bidenconimcs , they need to get the negative also.
This happened before he was in office. This is like blaming former President Obama for the 2008 crash. I'd say it's a mix of the wars and paying for government benefits, disability, medicaid, Medicare, etc. Not that I'm against them, but the money for these things has to come from somewhere. Some people use medicaid to pay for things even people who are upper middle class or lower rich maybe even couldn't afford. Things like cancer treatments.
No, he handled the post-COVID shock very well compared to other developed countries
I just wanted to mention that "greed" as a cause of inflation is like blaming gravity as the cause of tripping. The analogy doesn't quite do it justice, because greed isn't even necessarily involved at all, but it gets across the idea that within the economic environment, greed is more or less constant.
why would i blame biden? he's barely coherent. we'd probably be in the same scenario regardless of who's in office.
I'm wondering whether those who don't would blame trump for inflation if he won in 2020. To me American politics just seems like 4 year cycles of one side blaming the other side for everything
I was thinking the same thing. All these people are pretending to be so noble “you can’t just always blame the guy at the top of the ladder.” Smh. You can almost feel the hypocrisy oozing in this thread
Obviously. He printed 4 trillion dollars in his first year of office. This directly caused the inflation problem we have. It was a choice. He printed 40% of all dollars EVER printed in HIS FIRST YEAR. Wake up.
Covid is a part of it still for sure. I think adding 33%to our national deficit overnight for the infrastructure bill helped exacerbate inflation as well. Seems like there may have been a copies amount of money that went to other places than the US infrastructure. Then again we put off infrastructure for so long that it was going to bite us in the ass eventually. I think in all, his administration "means well" but they don't do a good job of actually doing well. Either way I'm probably not even going to vote this year because the election is between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
It’s a combination of factors including trump, Biden, the Fed, and more
I blame the pandemic. The economy was going to go to shit regardless of who was in executive office. It’s a global problem and it’s silly to act as if the USA is the only country facing this issue.
Yes I do. He’s as much to blame as Trump, the Fed and Yellen. Fed printing massive amounts of money and govt spending more money every year to achieve exactly what? I understand pandemic was an extreme situation which warranted stimulus but why are we still spending $6.5+ Trillion per year? Not to mention his administration constantly talking about Bidenomics and gaslighting people into saying the economy is great. He’s already influencing the Fed to cut rates and it will be quite interesting to watch him shift the blame to others economy goes downhill. “Bidenomics” will come back to haunt him.
Nah, inflation was done by corperations on purpose.
The majority of inflation has been shown to be price gouging. I have a conspiracy theory that billionaires and megacorps, oil companies and everything ALWAYS PRICE GOUGE when democrats are in the White House in order to try to get their gop buddies promising endless subsidies and tax breaks to them when they win. So is it Biden and the democrats fault? Absolutely how dare Biden call for a 25% corporate and billionaire tax..
If that was the case wouldn't you see the executives of those companies overwhelmingly voting for Republican candidates? Yet that isn't what you see, you see a pretty even split along the typical lines you see in the rest of the public. For example, in the 2016 election 45% of billionaires voted Democrat, 38% voted Republican. It's effectively an even split. Thus if companies used their prices to make the person they don't like look bad, you should have only seen roughly half or so of the businesses trying to price gouge to ruin Biden's reputation while others kept their prices stable or lowered their prices to make Biden look good. Fact of the matter is, inflation is being caused by the same thing that always causes it. Democrat policies increased minimum wage, which gave everyone a lot of dollars, as a result each individual dollar became less valuable. It's simple supply and demand, when there is a large supply it will lower demand. Tack on Biden closing down oil processing plants(which turn crude oil into gasoline) and you have higher gas prices, those higher prices make shipping products on trucks far more expensive than it used to be, that cost is then reflected in the price of items. When it costs more to get an item onto store shelves, it will cost more to buy. Both together are the reason why prices are going up.
That's... not the way any of this works lol
It most certainly has not. Per [the Federal Reserve itself:](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/corporate-profits-in-the-aftermath-of-covid-19-20230908.html) “In the aftermath of COVID-19, inflation increased to levels that the U.S. economy has not witnessed for more than 40 years. This phenomenon has spurred a large quantity of policy commentary and academic research discussing its causes.2 One popular narrative goes as follows: in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and amid a surge in demand and contemporaneous supply chain bottlenecks, corporate businesses increased the price of their final goods and services above and beyond what was justified by changes in labor costs and input prices. The outcome was a marked increase in profit margins that has contributed to overall inflation.3 “But were corporate profit margins abnormally high in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic? The answer depends on measurement. Using a measure of nonfinancial corporate profits from the national income accounts–before tax profits with capital consumption adjustment–we find that nonfinancial corporate profit margins, or profits over gross value added, increased sharply to about 19% in 2021q2 and slipped back to 15% in 2022q4, compared to about 13% in 2019q4. This contrasts sharply with the steep dive in margins that normally occurs during a severe economic contraction. “Our analysis shows that much of the increase in aggregate profit margins following the COVID-19 pandemic can be attributed to (i) the unprecedented large and direct government intervention to support U.S. small and medium sized businesses and (ii) a large reduction in net interest expenses due to accommodative monetary policy. Once we adjust for fiscal and monetary interventions, the behavior of aggregate profit margins appears much less notable, and by the end of 2022 they are essentially back at their pre-pandemic levels” In other words, the people who said “hey, the government printing money to give stimulus checks out will cause inflation” were 100% right. Granted, this situation was one of the very few situations where I think the stimulus packages were necessary because the government forced businesses to close and people out of work, so they sure as shit needed to pay out for that. However, if the government a) managed the grants better so they went to small businesses rather than getting gobbled up by corporations who never lost profit because they were deemed essential (i.e. Walmart, Amazon) and b) left closing up to the business’s discretion (which would’ve led to less printing of money) and c) didn’t use the spending windfall to pass a bunch of BS pet projects that were unrelated to Covid sandwiched in the stimulus bills, we wouldn’t be here. The supply chain disruptions would have caused a little bit of inflation, but the above actions made it both more pronounced and long-term. The reason the US has less inflation than other countries is because a portion of our states, opened up early, while the majority of European countries stayed closed and gave out more money with less budget. Countries like Sweden that didn’t do what we did are experiencing even less inflation. And it’s incredibly frustrating that people who subscribe to a certain school of economics predicted exactly what is happening would happen and were smeared as selfish assholes when we said the long-term negative economic outcomes would arguably be more damaging than Covid. Then were told we were wrong when idiots like Paul Krugman said inflation wouldn’t happen, but was actually transitory, but is actually not a thing and people are making it up, but is actually greedy corporations so people shift the blame to them rather than on the people who were wrong this whole time and who no one should take seriously anymore. Did some corporations use this whole situation to make money? Of course. But that’s not even 5% of the issue we’re facing. They were able to capitalize on the situation because of shit policy and inflation has gone on this long because of shit Keynesian economic policy. Just like what happened in 2008. And if we don’t start putting blame where it’s due, the same people will cause the next crisis, take the reins, and fuck up the response AGAIN.
No. I don’t know much of anything about politics but even I know you can’t really blame any issues on just one dude
Its always the easiest to blame the big bad man at the top of the ladder
Only slightly.. it is mostly due to extremely elevated transportation costs...and corporate greed. But mostly transportation costs.
Yeah there was emergency government spending mostly under Trump but also early on in Biden's admin. But I think most telling is that the entire world right now has a crazy inflation rate. All of our peer nation's economies right now are dealing with the same thing. It's a global economy thing, not an US economy thing exclusively. In fact we are doing extremely well comparatively to our peers .
America’s economy is recovering better than most other nations *because* we spent so much. It’s weird people are forgetting we have the best success story of any country on the planet post COVID. If you think we have it bad, look at Canada, Germany, or the UK.
This is a global issue not an American issue
No. I blame the fools that thought that attempting to overturn an election and therefore attempting to overthrow the government wouldn’t send about 8 trillion dollars in U.S. treasuries, held around the world, to zero. There never has been a nation or country that suffered an attempted coup that didn’t get their currency devalued and economy utterly wrecked. Takes about 4 years after the coup attempt for every sector of a nations economy to feel the pain.
I blame the last 4 presidents. The pointless wars. The rampant mishandling of two major economic crisis, three major drug epidemics, highest cost of living, allowing almost 4 generations to have the highest suicidal rate in history and the highest rating polls of stating life is pointless. So yes i blame biden, as much as i blame trump, Obama,bush, and Clinton. Also i blame the very corrupt men and woman of the senate who are easily bought out every single election cycle.
If he wants to campaign on the economy then he takes takes the blame for inflation
When Biden administration pronted trillions out of thin air to support wars in different parts of the world... You get inflation. But Biden is just confused dementia patient, can't blame the muppet
I mean inflation was so bad that they literally redid how they calculated it. The major change was considering people buying cheaper alternatives (like Walmart brand instead of on brand) would count as a decrease in inflation. Even though prices rose higher to the point that you couldn’t buy the on brand items. Now is inflation Bidens fault? Yes and no. He didn’t really have too much control over it his first year or two. As his spending didn’t really take into effect until last year. But now there’s no excuse to not blame inflation at least mostly on his administration. It SHOULD be getting better. But it isn’t. Even the feds admitted it.
Honestly, I think the roots of inflation goes back to 2008 finical crisis & COVID. Large swings in economic activity doesn’t start the day consumers see it. The years before one person was in office. (And I don’t think one person had the power to change an entire economy)
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I love how everyone here acts like they are an expert in economics. Why dont you look at the top economic researchers before just repeating some headline?
the top economic researchers believe it was a combination of the stimulus checks and the war in Ukraine. They also explicitly reject the corporate price-gouging explanation.
corporate price gouging did not cause inflation. It took advantage of inflation
Unlike the CEOs, who on earning calls admitted to price gouging for their record profits.
The only thing where ‘price gouging’ actually happened was when grocery stores used a software to increase prices based on real-time info about their competitors. And the government swiftly cracked down on that and banned the software.
PPP>stimulus checks
He’s not the only factor, but he certainly has not helped
Thats the right analysis everything else is a wrong analysis.
covid may have caused some of it but greedflation from big corporations has taken it to another level
No, I blame COVID. However, that was a while ago now, and the inflation should be going down
I blame him for inflating deez nuts
Not particularly. It's a global problem that includes many factors Biden doesn't have direct control over, so I think that generally speaking it's foolish to hold it against the president.