Trump wins presidency for second time

>> There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible.

"Google, how do you fix inflation?"

We know inflation is the consequence of many factors, but it can be controlled by different entities at each stage. The two groups most instrumental in the fight against inflation are The Federal Reserve and the government.

The Fed using interest rate increases to make lending and investing more expensive is an example of monetary policy.

The Fed misread warnings in the spring of 2021 when it was clear to some that inflation was spreading. The Fed argued that inflation would be transitory and that it resulted from unusual circumstances, ranging from supply chain issues related to the abnormal demand that came from the end of the pandemic.

The government can use fiscal policy to fix inflation by increasing taxes or cutting spending. Increasing taxes leads to decreased individual demand and a reduction in the supply of money in the economy. As you can imagine, fiscal policy isn’t very popular because raising taxes is a difficult political move. The last thing that we want to hear when inflation is rising is that our taxes will also increase.

The government could use other fiscal policies to lower inflationary pressures. If Congress were to limit pandemic relief spending and focus on not making the deficit worse, that would assist in reducing inflation.

So no, there absolutely is ways to fix it and they 100% were responsible for it. The problem is when you constantly act like there isn't a problem, by the time they realized they had to fix it? It meant the cure is going to be worse than the disease - usually in the form of either cooling off the economy with interest rate hikes, or pushing the economy into a recession or increasing taxes or gasp cutting spending.

This is not graduate level economics we're talking here - its pretty common knowledge stuff. But if you say Biden wasn't responsible for the inflation on his watch, then by your logic you would have to excuse every president who had a poor economy because "its not their fault" and "there's no way to fix it."

Unfortunately, most people (like myself) know that's a load of poppycock and voted accordingly.

Are you arguing that they should have either raised taxes or introduced austerity measures as the recovery was just beginning because Google told you it would have helped?

It would not have undone prior inflation and it could have strangled the recovery in the crib. It wouldn't do anything about price gouging either and it would certainly have turned America against Biden and Harris. Its just a grab bag of bad ideas.

Also your preferred candidate has said he is going to drastically increase prices with massive tarriffs. This isn't strictly inflation but the effect on your wallet will be the same.

I would talk to actual economists instead of Google.

>> Are you arguing that they should have either raised taxes or introduced austerity measures as the recovery was just beginning because Google told you it would have helped?

My point was that even a search engine AI will tell you there's way to fix it because your entire premise is that it wasn't fixable and therefore, not the admins fault. Clearly not the case on either point.

>> It would not have undone prior inflation and it could have strangled the recovery in the crib.

Dude, where are you getting this? Inflation was 1.4% when he took office.

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.

This was from a CNN fact check: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/14/politics/fact-check-biden-inf...

>> It wouldn't do anything about price gouging.

This is a myth. Harris was proposing using Carter era price controls to try and go after "price gouging". Not sure how old you are, but guess what happened when Carter tried that in the 1970's? It lasted less than 2 years before Carter compromised with Congress on a “windfall profits tax” proposal.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/may/15/20060515-12...

The price controls resulted in a fuel-rationing system that made available about 5 percent less oil than was consumed before the controls. Consumers scrambled and sat in lines to ensure they weren’t left without. Gas stations found they only had to stay open a few hours a day to empty out their tanks. Because they could not raise prices, they closed down after selling out their gas to hold down their labor and operating costs, Mr. Sowell said.

When you use price controls, you get less of what you want, not more. This creates what we've already seen in the 1970's as noted above.

This also happened with Bruce Springsteen and how he was pricing his tickets:

Springsteen used to sell tickets to his concerts for very low prices because he wanted ordinary working men and women to be able to afford them. What actually happened: Ticket resellers bought up all the tickets. So a ticket with a face value of $30 went for $100, except $70 of that went to a third party. At some point it occurred to Springsteen that if tickets to his shows were selling for $100, it didn’t make a lot of sense for $70 of that to go to a middleman who not only didn’t write “Born to Run,” he didn’t even write “Workin’ on a Dream.” Years ago, Springsteen dropped his “friend of the working man” pricing policy, which is why the last time I went to one of his concerts the face value of the ticket was $350. Is Springsteen guilty of “price gouging” for denying ticket resellers the opportunity to make gigantic profits from his work and artistry? Were those resellers guilty of “price gouging” for selling those tickets for what people were willing to pay?

>> Also your preferred candidate has said he is going to drastically increase prices with massive tariffs. This isn't strictly inflation but the effect on your wallet will be the same.

This isn't how tariffs work. Tariffs are put in place to discourage people from buying products produced in China and instead buy American made goods and services. They work because people buy less goods from China. Those who do, then pay more so along with the increased revenue, the government is able to generate revenue from the tariffs. If you don't want to pay more for Chinese goods, then you have plenty of options to buy stuff from American producers or other countries like Taiwan, Japan and other countries.

Because I live in a market driven, capitalistic economy, I can make choices to avoid paying more for Chinese goods, or if I want to, I can still buy those goods, albeit at an elevated price point. Nobody is forcing you to buy Chinese goods. Therefore, no, it won't affect my wallet the same because I still have the choice of whether to buy those goods and services or go somewhere else. This is the complete opposite of how price controls work where the government is rationing products in order to maintain a price point.

>> I would talk to actual economists instead of Google.

I have a minor in economics, two of my best friends work in finance and graduated from Ivy League schools and worked on Wall St for a decade. My father was a self made millionaire and entrepreneur. I currently own two businesses and deal with this stuff on a daily basis. The fact remains that the Biden admin denied that inflation was happening. By the time they decide to act, it was so bad that any solution would involve quite a bit of pain as I previously pointed out. Had they just admitted inflation was going up, they could've acted sooner to deal with it. Ignoring it put them in a place where you either had to do nothing and allow a long winded market correction (which is what they did) or trigger a recession, or raise taxes, something nobody would be ok with - which then would've had implications for Biden's re-election which they weren't going to jeopardize.

So yeah, I do talk with actual people who actually know how the markets and the economy works and I myself actually know how this stuff works because I've been dealing with it for over two decades, with both Democratic and Republican presidents.

Actual working economists weighed in on both Biden's handling of the recovery especially in context of an executive only strategy with a do nothing congress and the wisdom of Trumps tariffs. I choose to believe their analysis not yours. The fact that you think posting Google AIs take on the matter is useful or proves something indicates a deficit in understanding not only of the topic but how and why humans communicate.

Trump suggested ruinously high tariffs not only on China but everywhere other than the US and believed that this would be not a spur to move people to US goods but somehow a continuous tax on other countries. He also suggested putting this forward immediately to open the money spigot to our country that would distribute this new found wealth.

There is no way that our economy aligns around home produced goods that don't even exist in sufficient quantity nor price in any reasonable time frame. Instead you get massive price increases in price while people scramble, trade wars, supply shortages, knock on effects for people whose own economic activities require goods they can't get at a reasonable price and price increases in domestic goods and services which require foreign goods and services (most of them) and recession.

This is without the additional shock to the system of putting tens of millions of productively employed individuals in concentration camps and the widespread unrest that is sure to follow that action.

None of this positions the US well to invest in domestic goods because people don't invest in the middle of unrest. If Trump keeps his campaign promises the entire economy is going down the crapper.