I think the Red Light district was closed. If it's a matter of supply and demand given how much tourism was down lap dance prices should be lower.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-inflation-blame-game-budget-carter-1970s-voters-denial-biden-powell-2022-midterms-11642008348 The Democrats’ Inflation Blame Game Everyone and everything is responsible except the government spending that’s actually fueling it. By Phil Gramm and Mike Solon Jan. 12, 2022 1:26 pm ET Despite Wednesday’s inflation report indicating that consumer prices have risen by 7% over the past 12 months and accelerated to 9.1% over the past three months, the president and Democrats other than Sen. Joe Manchin remain firmly entrenched in a state of denial. In their telling, this inflation has nothing to do with their spending policy. This is the same argument we heard in the mid-1970s. When we both began our careers in public service, the U.S. was suffering from the high inflation of the late 1970s. The federal government had squandered a decade in denying that its policies had anything to do with inflation. Politicians made convenient scapegoats out of big oil, big banks, big communications and even big grocers. Government made the problem worse with price controls, investigations into price fixing and antitrust actions. It embarrassed itself with WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons and Inflation Gardens. Mounting voter outrage finally ended the charade. President Carter responded by leading the deregulation of airlines, railroads and trucking and appointing Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve. Congressional Democrats created the budget-reconciliation process to cut spending, but in the end they lacked the resolve to make significant cuts. Voters lost patience in 1978, adding three Republicans to the Senate and 15 to the House. They were joined by a dozen newly elected conservative Democrats. In 1980 President Reagan was swept into office with a Republican Senate majority and a bipartisan House majority of conservative Democrats and Republicans. Voters’ voices ultimately drowned out the inflation deniers, as the Reagan program ended the inflationary spiral, brought interest rates down to earth, ignited economic growth, and won the Cold War. Democrats and Republicans offered competing tax cuts to undo the inflation-driven bracket-creep tax increases of the 1970s, which the Senate passed by a voice vote. For 40 years, the pain of inflation was only a fading nightmare. Then last year, piled on top ofDonald Trump’s ill-advised postelection spending surge, the Biden administration, the Democratic majority in Congress, the Federal Reserve, and a chorus of intellectual supporters assured the nation that with accommodating monetary easing by the Fed, they could increase federal spending by 54% without causing inflation. When—shockingly—prices started to rise, those same voices harmonized in assuring the nation that any inflation would be minor and temporary. To this day, they blame the inflation on supply-chain problems and the usual suspects: big business, insufficient antitrust enforcement and greedy profiteers. They never blame government. Obviously the pandemic disrupted the economy and contributed to inflationary pressures, but U.S. production is higher today, and U.S. ports are moving 27% more goods than before the pandemic. Inflation, driven by excess demand, always faces supply-chain problems as production struggles to keep up. But supply-chain problems increasingly are the result of inflation rather than its cause. What was billed as minor and temporary inflation has risen at rates unseen for four decades. So rapidly have prices risen that despite increases in nominal wages, real median weekly wages are $11.58 lower today than when President Biden took office. That decline in real wages is 19% larger than the decline that occurred during the entire subprime financial crisis. But as American workers suffer declining real wages, Democrats and outside experts assure us that spending another $4.9 trillion to fully fund the Build Back Better plan is the key to ending inflation. This claim, which Minority Leader Mitch McConnell describes as Democrats’ “inflating their way out of inflation,” reminds us of the old George Orwell observation: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” As in the late 1970s, inflation is punishing workers, consumers and savers. But the government is largely protected. More than half of the federal budget is composed of entitlements, most of which are automatically adjusted for inflation (with a one-year lag). The remainder of the budget is set at a “current services baseline” that assumes all government programs will be increased by at least the inflation rate. But if government and its beneficiaries are protected from inflation, who bears its brunt? The people who do the work, pay the taxes, and pull the wagon in America—especially blue-collar workers who have no automatic inflation adjustments in their employment contracts and who put their savings in certificates of deposit—will find no shelter in this storm. Those who were paid extra to come back to work and those who got big government checks will take a smaller hit, but the biggest losers will be the Americans who soldiered through the pandemic, stayed at their jobs, cared for the sick, kept food on our tables, and kept the country secure. No Democrat in Washington is standing up for their interests—except Mr. Manchin. If history is any guide to the future, and of course it is the only guide, the voters will render judgment in 2022. At this point in the inflation cycle of the late 1970s, conservative Democrats were winning primaries and being elected to Congress and the Carter administration was changing policy. The real question is not why Mr. Manchin is standing up against inflationary spending but why the senator from West Virginia stands alone. Is compassion now something Democrats can feel only for people riding in the wagon? Is the Biden administration so dominated by leftist zealots that, unlike the Carter administration, it is more committed to its transformational agenda of expanding the dominance of government than it is to stopping the inflation? Based on the history we have lived through, our guess is that other Democrats who will face voters in 2022 will wish they had joined Mr. Manchin, or at least offered an “amen” to his efforts. We’ve seen this all before. The intelligentsia and their politicians may be confused, but the working people of America are not. Mr. Gramm is a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and a visiting scholar at American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Solon is a partner of US Policy Metrics.
The opposite of spending and inflation is a recession and lots of unemployment. This is much better than 2007/2008 for the working age population. What about this business friendly private sector supply chain? GOP doesn’t like to talk about those trades off between efficiency and redundancy.
rut roh. even CNN is starting to beat the inflation drum If prices keep rising, a nightmare scenario for the US economy is a real possibility https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/12/economy/stagflation-inflation-economy-cpi/index.html
CNN has been beating the drum for awhile…. It’s weird how the MSM doesn’t simp for Biden like how your conservative media does for your side.
Ironically, the Fed has been wanting inflation to offset delfationary weakness since post-GFC. We're in the late stages of building a house of cards. Raise the rates too "high" (3%+) and a whole swath of investment grade BBB rated corporations will start to go bankrupt. Meanwhile the our national debt has surpassed our GDP, something we haven't seen since WW2. You might think winning a world war "solved it", but there was a decade plus of austerity and rationing that paid that sucker off. I'm betting Americans would rather have a world war than cutting the spending spigot for 10-15 years.
You’re right, we’ve been trying to induce inflation since 2008/2009. Deflation is far worse. We have climate change, China competition, and a massive demographic retiring. We have no choice to spend. Boomers ain’t voting to make the retirement checks less.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/great-resignation-economy-biden-recovery-build-back-better Inflation is in the news again, given the most recent economic release, yet, by and large, it is being used as a boogeyman to push austerity policies. An additional month of bad data is bad news, not so much for the impact on persons, but for the dangers of a rash policy response. As noted above, wages are growing at roughly the same rate as inflation, and Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation. More federal spending helps people more than inflation hurts them. On the one side, we can cite reductions in child poverty, fewer evictions and bankruptcies than would have happened otherwise. And by the way, inflation helps debtors paying fixed interest rates, since their repayments are made in cheaper dollars +++++++++++++ The owners of the media and businesses and those whose wealth is primarily due to stocks and bonds are more hurt or at least obsessed with taxes due to government spending than by inflation. As usual conservatives and unaware moderates, who in many ways think that only economic incentives make (and should! make) the world go around, are completely oblivious to the possibility that the media they consume could be influenced by the pocket books of the owners of the media.
I actually don't mind austerity policies. What i don't like is for any side to campaign on them, only to unleash unfunded bank breaking tax cuts when they get into power. Each run off spending and stimulus has a short term benefit (and inflation bump) of one quarter then it quickly tapers and reverts back to deflation a few quarters after funding ends. Happened with Bush, Obama, Trump and it'll happen here. We need to tighten our belts for ten years and pay off 28 trillion worth of IOUs from past excess. The interest we're paying off has snowballed into a crippling albatross around our neck and is the prime cause for sustaining ultra low interest rates for the past 15 years. You'd think there'd be a multiplier effect from stimulus except for the fact you have to pay it off plus with compound interest. So not only do you need to win back your investment, it has to overperform and pay off the loan. Welfare or checks won't necessarily do that... By 2031, we'll be paying off 900 billion in interest. So i imagine in a decade it'll be one trillion. One trillion in non-productive non-performing taxpayer money because our politicians are too scared of losing power for an electorate that wants to have cake and eat it too (both sides). https://www.thebalance.com/interest-on-the-national-debt-4119024 This is going to hit a generation with a ton of bricks. Maybe millennials can build a house from that.
'Sick to my stomach': Dollar Tree fanatics protest new $1.25 prices https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/business/dollar-tree-new-prices/index.html
on the other hand . . . We’re excited to share that we are lowering the price of your League Pass subscription and adding NBA TV access at no additional cost. NBA TV is your hub for around-the-clock NBA coverage, including studio shows, additional live games, and more. Your new monthly billing price will be $14.99. The new lower price will automatically be charged during your next billing cycle with no further action required. Thank you for being a valued subscriber! –The NBA Team thanks Joe Biden!!
one would have to willfully ignorant, to resort to the disjointed words of the former Cocaine addict, Glenn Beck. the only thing Glenn Becks knows about economic is that he doesn't understand it anyone w a little knowledge of economic and history and want to link inflation and the Dems would use the the hard economic times under Jimmy Carter biggest lie spinned by glen beck in that video is his false claim that before 1971, the Fed was barred from printing $ in large quantity like QE. not true. the Fed has always had the ability to implement QE, which was implemented by the Fed during FDR's tenure to resuscitate a dying US economy, to lift it from a depression
at the time, it was called the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), a program revived from the global financial crisis, the Fed offered low interest rate loans up to 90 days to 24 large financial institutions known as primary dealers.
so then what happened in 1971? surely the dollar/gold convertibility requirement constrained the Fed, no?
