With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways

psychothumbs@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 318 points –
With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways | Margaret Sullivan
theguardian.com
62

You are viewing a single comment

Straight up gaslighting. Inflation is low? We just got battered by rising inflation for two straight years. That doesn't go away because a month turned over. Everyone's dollar devalued hard and prices aren't coming back down again now that they're standard. You could only believe this if your job depends on believing it.

Inflation is low now. Cost of living went up by like 25% over the last 3 years. Not to mention, I still have pretty slim prospects of owning a house in a convenient and desirable location, and I’m on a software engineering salary. So yeah, economists, you can absolutely shut the fuck up about the economy being so “fantastic”.

And hey, you know, maybe maybe Democrats shouldn’t campaign on how “great” the economy is if nobody who actually works for a fucking living is seeing in real life how “great” it is.

Yeah like I vote dem because the alternative pretty explicitly wants me dead, but I’m an engineer who is still struggling in a medium cost of living area.

It’s like the Dems are afraid to acknowledge their strengths. Your opponents are committing crimes against democracy and promising brutal oppression of women and minorities as well as their political opponents. I think that the only major issue with their financial strategy right now is that it’s too far right, but don’t fucking run on it. Run on the fact that your opponents are fighting for unpopular opinions

Inflation is a rate of change.

If prices went up a lot last year, but they're not going up much now, inflation now is low.

"Low inflation" doesn't mean prices going down or the value of the dollar going up relative to a basket of goods. That would be "deflation".

My bad, am I mixing up inflation and cost-of-living? I'm trying to understand the economy jargon better.

The point still stands that the rate of inflation is down but we still have to deal with that long period of time AKA 2022 where it didn't dip below 7.5%.

Nothing any government can do will undo the high inflation of 2022. Deflation must be avoided, because while consumer prices would go back down, the main effect of long-term deflation is that everybody stops investing and starts saving. Why would I buy new tools now when I can wait for tomorrow and get them cheaper then? When the entire economy does that, it shrinks. Catastrophic for capitalism. Prices are what they are, they've stopped going up, can't realistically wish for more.

Furthermore to blame high inflation on the Biden administration shows a complete lack of journalistic integrity. Like blaming the '08 crisis on Obama. Both were worldwide events which, if the US weren't so god-damn self-centered, anyone could realize were just as bad or even worse in other developed countries. In 2022 most of the Eurozone was well above US inflation levels (without going too technical, the US Fed had more leeway to much more aggressively raise interest rates to reign in inflation, which it did successfully).

Now there is plenty of blame to be passed around for a lot of specific economic policy items that impact cost-of-living (wages, housing, student debt, etc.). Inflation isn't one of them.

2 more...
2 more...
2 more...

Yeah, that was a bit of an insidious statement. Month over month or year over year inflation may be manageable now, but that does nothing to reverse the price spikes over the last two years. And the vast majority of us did not see pay raises to match them.

2 more...