On 8/30/24 3:50 PM, Governor Swill wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:43:23 -0400, -hh <recscuba_google@huntzinger.com> wrote:
>
>> On 8/29/24 9:02 PM, Joel wrote:
>>> Charlie Glock <"Charlie Glock"@localhost.com> wrote:
>>>> On 2024-08-29, Joel <joelcrump@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> pothead <pothead@snakebite.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>>> None of this misery we are in started under Trump.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Example: Inflation the day Biden was inaugurated was 1.9% (CPI).
>>>>>>>> A year later under Biden / Harris it was 9.1%
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> If you can't see through why that's BS, you are a "low information
>>>>>>> voter".
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Except for snit, you are the lowest information voter around these parts.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Right from one of the left's most trusted news sources.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> <https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/14/politics/fact-check-biden-inflation-when-he-became-president/index.
>>>>>> html>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ' For the second time in less than a week, President Joe Biden falsely claimed Tuesday that the
>>>>>> inflation rate was 9% when he began his presidency.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Biden was criticized by many Republicans, including former president and current presidential rival
>>>>>> Donald Trump, for telling CNN in an interview last Wednesday: “No president’s had the run we’ve had
>>>>>> in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% percent when I came to office, 9%.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Biden repeated the claim about the inflation rate, albeit in slightly vaguer form, in a Tuesday
>>>>>> interview with Yahoo Finance. This time, he said: “I think inflation has gone slightly up. It was at
>>>>>> 9% when I came in, and it’s now down around 3%.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *Facts First: Biden’s claim that the inflation rate was 9% when he became president is not close to
>>>>>> true. The year-over-year inflation rate in January 2021, the month of his inauguration, was about
>>>>>> 1.4%. The Biden-era inflation rate did peak at about 9.1% – but that peak occurred in June 2022,
>>>>>> after Biden had been president for more than 16 months. The March 2024 inflation rate, the most
>>>>>> recent available rate at the time Biden made these comments, was about 3.5%, up from about 3.2% the
>>>>>> month prior.*
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In other words, Biden’s claims make it sound like inflation is much lower today than it was when he
>>>>>> was inaugurated – but it is actually higher, though there has been a steep decline since the June
>>>>>> 2022 peak. (That peak followed Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which sparked global
>>>>>> increases in energy and food prices.) And while Biden’s claims make it sound like the end of the
>>>>>> Trump presidency was plagued by high inflation, inflation was unusually low during Trump’s last
>>>>>> months in the White House amid the economic slowdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Similar to a previous false claim
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Biden’s false claims in the past week about overall inflation are similar to a false claim he made
>>>>>> in October 2022 when talking about gas prices in particular. In both cases, he has wrongly depicted
>>>>>> a figure from June 2022 as if it was the Biden-era starting point.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A White House official said in a Tuesday email to CNN: “The President was making the point that the
>>>>>> factors that caused inflation were in place when he took office. The pandemic caused inflation
>>>>>> around the world by disrupting our economy and breaking our supply chains.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The April 2024 inflation rate will be revealed Wednesday with the release of new Consumer Price
>>>>>> Index data. Separate Producer Price Index data that was released on Tuesday showed the highest
>>>>>> wholesale inflation rate in a year. '
>>>>>
>>>>> Free hint, ma'am, as they always say, correlation doesn't prove
>>>>> causation. Your quoting of the CNN article explains this, in fact,
>>>>> that these economic factors aren't directly under the control of the
>>>>> government or its leaders. If Trump had won in 2020, the inflation
>>>>> would've happened under his watch. He lost, so it happened under
>>>>> Biden's watch. Get over it, it's the world we're in. We're not gonna
>>>>> vote for the antichrist because of some right-wing media scheme, to
>>>>> tell us it will magically make everything "great". It's a lie. Voting
>>>>> for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will keep us on track to continue
>>>>> recovering from the pandemic.
>>>>>
>>>> She really stuck it to you Joel. Two for the price of one. She proved her statement and also
>>>> demonstrated what a liar Joe Biden is. I do disagree with one statement though. Snit is quite a bit
>>>> more intelligent than you are.
>>>
>>>
>>> What a joke, you think she "proved" something? Only that she's
>>> willing to use information to jump to conclusions, and you're
>>> apparently the same. Fox News Channel-watching dummies.
>>>
>>
>> This is a good example of attempted propaganda, as it used "truthful"
>> data to substantiate the propaganda's claim, as it allows people to
>> forget to test the underlying premise for its inherent validity.
>>
>> What's invalid here is the implicit assumption that the economy has zero
>> inertia, such that a change in fiscal policy will cause a sudden and
>> large change within hours/days/etc: it simply does not work that way.
>>
>> Case in point, household savings exists, which is a fiscal buffer
>> between expenses vs income. That's fiscal "inertia" which creates a lag
>> between changes in inputs and subsequent outputs.
>>
>> For example, if one has 6 months worth of savings, if one's paycheck
>> were to suddenly stop, one's payments of bills isn't going to drop to
>> literally zero within just the first month: even if you reduce your
>> immediate spending, that savings gives you time to fix the income
>> revenue side (eg, go look for a new job) and stabilize your cash flow.
>>
>>
>> In the case of our recent inflation, much of it was due to an imbalance
>> in fiscal stimulus vs supply (eg, "too much" stimulus money).
>
> All that stimulus allowed the US economy to recover faster and more broadly than
> any other economy on earth. The price we paid for that recovery was a brief
> period of sharp inflation as the savings you elaborate on below got spent when
> the economy opened back up.

The policy makers did have a quite difficult decision to balance, as the
trade-off was to provide stimulus that wasn't enough to forestall a
recession (which effectively wastes the money invested), versus spending
"too much" knowing that we'd have to pay the price of higher inflation
later on if it worked.

The downside risks were less severe for the "overfund" scenario than for
the "underfund", so that's how we ended up with the decision that they
made.

FWIW, we could have reduced the amount of inflation if we would have NOT
forgiven the PPP loans and other corporate giveaways, for requiring
their repayment (on a delay, of course) would have had the same fiscal
effect of removing money from the economy ... reducing inflation ... in
lieu of higher Fed interest rates.

Yet another option available was for Congress to pass a tax rate hike.
Yeah, I know, "political third rail", but fiscally, its still an option.

To this end, this is why the 2017 TCJA shouldn't be extended: there's
still an ongoing need to reduce inflation by reducing free money, and
choosing to increase tax rates enables making an interest rate cut,
which lowers the Federal Budget's debt service costs.

>> Fortunately, much of the pandemic stimulus checks to households wasn't
>> spent, but saved:
>>
>> "Over the pandemic, historic levels of government transfers boosted
>> household income while household spending was severely curtailed by
>> social distancing. This led the personal saving rate to soar (Figure 1),
>> and we estimate that U.S. households accumulated about $2.3 trillion in
>> savings in 2020 and through the summer of 2021, above and beyond what
>> they would have saved if income and spending components had grown at
>> recent, pre-pandemic trends."
>>
>>
>> <https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/excess-savings-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-20221021.html>
>>
>> But much of this 'free money' has now been spent, which is why there
>> was a lag between when the checks were sent and when the inflation it
>> caused was recorded.
>>
>> YA example of a 2nd order fiscal effect that's not easy for the general
>> public to understand, even though they participated in causing it.
>
> I sure don't know of anybody who sent back their stimulus deposits.
>
> Trump has found a new way to embarrass himself in Montana
> <https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7_nVxRn4_tc>
>
> --
> #NEVERtrump

-hh