What is the Republican plan to bring down inflation? I've heard many Republicans bring up inflation and say it wasn't as bad under Trump but I've not heard a solution.
Under Republican administrations we haven't seen reduced spending but increased spending. Also tax cuts add to inflation. [edit] I see Major beat me to it.
I'd rather see more progressive taxes for people with 10-20m> net worth, but it'll be hard to pass or even popular during a recessionary environment. I'll give Obama some credit for the "austerity" handed to him in his final years despite his role in ballooning the national debt, but Dems clearly saw Trump's profligate spending (which I've railed against more) as a lost opportunity and they obviously felt like suckers for being the "responsible party" and decided another Cares Act (plus a whole lot of other goodies) was needed when Biden came in. So I'm not discounting Trump's role nor the forgotten Bush precedent of ugly spending behavior Trump recreated with Republicans. When you look at what either party is known to campaign for (and not necessarily keep), Dems will still play on MMT hopes even if they can't credibly call it in name, while Repubs will go back to their TeaBaggin ways even if it was full of hot air as it was a decade ago as it'd likely be now. The Fed won't be cutting a 150B check for this year or likely next. That's a huge hole that covered the stink of our interest payments and partisans will jump onto the optics from that loss or the overall national debt ballooning beyond 130% of our GDP. Even if one can argue the national debt ratio isn't as bad as consumer debt to GDP, a medium to bad recession will affect private debt as rates and inflation move higher and higher.
return to the gold standard! more realistically, remove as many regulatory/tax burdens to production costs as possible, starting with fossil fuel production that doesn't address the runaway money printing, but it helps on the cost side of the equation
I'm not sure a sarcastic "it's all transitory" is really managing to communicate all that. I don't think I'd say that it was obvious they were wrong when they said it. It's notoriously difficult to predict the future. Props to you if you didn't believe them at the time and have since been proven correct. As to motivations, I don't think it's about elections. I think they were hoping to manage market psychology, understanding that recession can be a self-fulfilling prophecy if people draw back from participation for fear of that recession. I think they feared spooking the market if they leapt to the most pessimistic interpretation. They don't care about elections. As for system collapse, again predicting the future is hard. It's not obvious to me that it will happen. Nor what we should be doing to best mitigate the damage if it's inevitable. But feel free to say 'I told you so' later if you end up being right.
Inflation isn't being driven by rising costs at this point - we're in a voluntary inflation phase as supply chains have started repairing themselves. Companies are operating at 50-yr high profit margins - they are simply raising prices and pocketing the profits because they can. If I still had my coffee shop, I'd do the same - it's a free opportunity to raise prices and blame an external source. We're speaking inflation into existence to a large degree right now. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-25/us-corporate-profits-soar-taking-margins-to-widest-since-1950#:~:text=After-tax profits as a,Commerce Department figures published Thursday. A measure of US profit margins has reached its widest since 1950, suggesting that the prices charged by businesses are outpacing their increased costs for production and labor. After-tax profits as a share of gross value added for non-financial corporations, a measure of aggregate profit margins, improved in the second quarter to 15.5% -- the most since 1950 -- from 14% in the first quarter, according to Commerce Department figures published Thursday.
Because before people would notice a price change and if competitors didn't also raise prices, you're at a disadvantage. Now everyone has been raising prices so even when your own costs don't go up, everyone is used to price increases and you can get away with it. It's just a cycle of everyone raising prices because everyone else is, and everyone is just now pocketing the profits, as seen by the above graph.
the game theory doesn't make sense if the prices are artificially high, you lower them to capture market share if you keep prices high only to match a competitor, you are missing out on market share
We've moved past that with modern consumer culture. Hence why so much of Trump's amazing economic growth was backed by consumer debt. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u...d-during-the-2008-financial-crisis-2019-06-19 I mean at the end of the day it all depends on the individual product and how elastic their demand is.
the boomers started to retired in the early 2000s, 20 yrs later, the US economy has continued to be strong, strong enough to withstand the incompetence of W, who was responsible for the financial industry meltdown
I haven't seen any Republicans actually campaigning on that. Not exactly. That might address some supply chain issue but as inflation is also a side product of an overheated economy. Cutting regulations might just add more heat to the economy in areas that increas inflation. Anyway as far as fossil fuel production there are already tons of existing leases for O&G that arent' being used or were used and capped having nothign to do with regulation since these are existing leases.
That's not going to cut inflation. Cutting taxes/regulation increases activity which is major driver in the problem. Our economy does not have enough labor combined with too much demand and not enough supply.
Honestly cutting taxes to fix inflation is as dumb as issuing a stimulus check. The fix is pain in reining in a decade of loose fiscal policy from the fed and doing what we can to address systemic issues in the workforce that COVID exposed and are unlikely to self correct.
Inflation isn't bad if everyone's wages can outpace overall price increases. This kind of inflation is affecting middle-lower classes first while Americans in general are tapping deeper into their credit cards. Fossil fuel production is tricky because the West in general wants to phase out of that industry entirely by actively putting more bets into renewables. If a rosy projections of a complete phase-out occurred by one decade, most of these oil majors will have to deal with incredibly cheap gas at higher supplies or expensive prices with lower production. They're choosing the latter while not reinvesting in future upkeep, which might be shitty, but is the rational thing to do for a business devoted towards generating profits. Anyways, I don't know whether more or less intervention is beneficial to the industry. The fracking boom came out of nowhere under Obama. While Obama's circumstances also looked dire, he didn't have to deal with balancing potentially riot-inducing inflation increases against interest rates that could break different systems around the world.
