Joe Biden tries to explain inflation:
"[My wife's friend] was sayin’ ‘do you realize it’s over 5 dollars for a pound of hamburger meat?’ 5 dollars. Well this is partly, you know, the pound of beef today costs 5 bucks compared to less than 4 bucks before the pandemic.”
😳😳😳 pic.twitter.com/1vPJUcuUeu
— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) January 3, 2022
Whenever governmental actions cause inflation, the people in charge are quick to blame everyone but themselves. That is why the Puppetmasters had Grandpa Simpson Biden led into his bizarre fake oval office where he could rant against “Big Meat”. Calls are now coming from Democrats for some form of wage and price controls, a la Nixon. Uncle Miltie, do the honors:
A good book on the subject says it all in the title: Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls. The idea that economies can be ruled by governmental fiat is one of the more destructive myths in the lexicon of absurdities embraced by governments since Sumer.
Grandpa Simpson Biden.
Very appropriate.
What a joke. And they had the audacity to beat up on Trump.
Look what your cheating brought to America, Democrats.
Shame on the Ass party.
Well, Congress is chock a block with lawyers who, like Joseph Biden, spent about four years as associates before cadging a government salary. And remember when Thos. Perez admitted he’d gone to law school because he was bad at math?
The people responsible for this would be the Federal Reserve Board and anyone putting pressure on the Federal Reserve Board, whether it’s Klain or Yellen or whomever. The first thing they can do is to stop injecting cash into the economy. As for the politicians, what they can do is stop flooding the bond market with all the deficit spending.
Yes, the buttons were pretty dumb. But the actual policy arguments behind the “WIN” program were sound, as I recall, favoring the sorts of actions (and non-actions) Art mentions, and suggesting small ways in which everyone could help. All of it would have been ridiculed by the usual suspects in any event, of course, but the buttons and Jerry Ford’s own mannerisms just made for a bigger and easier target.
As any well-trained leftist will tell us, *the sole reason that the price of beef has risen is “climate change.” Yup, beef comes from cows, cows eat grass, grass need a proper climate to grow and man has destroyed the climate, so it is our fault that beef has gone up.
*(mea culpa for the omission of 10 uses of the magic word–“ecological”)
This is what you get when you order a POTUS and Congress through the mail.
You get the economy you deserve – good and hard.
The cemetery raised its burial fees – blamed the cost of living.
We’ve experienced this previously. The Fed and US government cannot do whatever they please with regard to massive deficits, energy policy, money printing, etc. and the nation not experience untoward economic outcomes.
The people that wrought this inflation have to idea how to reduce it.
Art, Right as usual. Even though the Fed monthly is buying $40 billion less MBS and UST securities, it needs to also stop reinvesting maturing securities proceeds – which is more than the $40 billion monthly. They have merely slowed the increases.
My ‘issue’ is, Will they need to yugely raise rates like Volcker did?
Yes, the buttons were pretty dumb. But the actual policy arguments behind the “WIN” program were sound, as I recall, favoring the sorts of actions (and non-actions) Art mentions, and suggesting small ways in which everyone could help. All of it would have been ridiculed by the usual suspects in any event, of course, but the buttons and Jerry Ford’s own mannerisms just made for a bigger and easier target.
I don’t recall the WIN program included a pledge by Arthur Burns to control the growth rate of monetary aggregates. More than any other man, Burns was responsible for the inflation we were experiencing at that time. What I can recall of the WIN program was Gerald Ford offering exhortations to reduce personal consumption; it seems to have been inspired by WWii era household recycling. Alan Greenspan was frankly embarrassed by it.
By some accounts, Arthur Burns was an adherent of novel economic models which contended that inflation was inescapable or that restabilizing prices would be socially injurious. His predecessor William Martin had successfully re-stabilized prices in 1951-52 and his successor Paul Volcker did so (more or less) in 1981-82, but Burns had persuaded himself that This.Time.Is.Different. ‘Twixt Burns and Volcker was Wm. Miller, a lawyer / business executive without on-point experience or education. Note, the attempt by the Nixon administration to re-stabilize prices in 1969 was abandoned after a recession ensued and they made no progress against inflation while experiencing unemployment. Milton Friedman explained at the time that the Phillips Curves that so addled Keynsian macroeconomists were short-term functions which assumed a certain level of expected inflation on the part of the public. You couldn’t choose a point on the Phillips Curve because the Curve itself was protean. The Nixon people weren’t listening. If the Nixon people had stuck with the program, we’d have wrung inflation out of the economy in 1969 and 1970 and been done with the problem. The Republicans would have taken a hit in the 1970 Congressional midterms, of course. The Nixon nostalgiacs need to have this shoved in their faces.
My ‘issue’ is, Will they need to yugely raise rates like Volcker did?
Volcker’s board implemented controls on the growth of monetary aggregates and let interest rates fluctuate.
During the period running from 1954 to 1965, the excess of the Federal Funds Rate over the GDP Deflator fluctuated between 0% and 3.5%. During the period in question, it was about thus:
1978: 0.27%
1979: 2.3%
1980: 3.7%
1981: 8%
1982: 6.8%
1983: 5.2%
1984: 6.6%
1985: 5.4%
1986: 4.5%
1987: 3.5%
Note, from 1947 to the Present, the two most dynamic business cycles in terms of real GDP growth were those running from 1949 to 1954 and from 1982 to 1990. The higher interest rates were not inconsistent with growth in production.
I’m sure you’re right, Art.
The thing is these woeful practitioners in applied socialist ideology and leftist economics myths and subverted statistics have no idea how to solve the problem.
The thing is these woeful practitioners in applied socialist ideology and leftist economics myths and subverted statistics have no idea how to solve the problem.
Elizabeth Warren hasn’t a clue, but that’s not Yellen’s problem. Last I checked, five of the six members of the Federal Reserve Board were appointed by Trump. Be fascinated to know what their excuses are.
Separation of Economy and State. Real freedom and liberty disallows for the magnitude of disequilibriums brought about by statist governmentalism.
Wage and Price Controls and WIN: idiotic solutions brought to us by the same source that caused the problem.
Inflation is looked at by many as prices going up, rather than seen correctly as the dollar’s value going down.
Separation of Economy and State. Real freedom and liberty disallows for the magnitude of disequilibriums brought about by statist governmentalism.
This is a nonsense statement.
Free Market Capitalism – the unknown ideal.