re: Are we about to hit stagflation?

You too are suffering from Joe’s dementia and are on here posting, admirable!

Correct

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but he wouldn’t have fricked oil and gas like Biden has, which has been one of the biggest drivers of inflation.

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Up until just recently energy prices were dragging inflation down.

I just saw this in my email and thought it's relevant to the thread.

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It's Not Me, It's You: Blaming the Public's "Perception of the Economy"

If you think you spent twenty years being ripped off while a generation of rent-seeking scam artists was showered with public subsidies, experts agree: your "perception" needs correcting

“People are really tying Bidenomics and their perception of the economy to the inflation rate,” said Matt Monday of Morning Consult, in a new Bloomberg story titled, “Biden’s gains against Trump vanish against deep economic pessimism, poll shows.” It’s the latest entrant in an intensifying campaign to describe voters, especially in key electoral swing states, as morons and partisan haters who’ll deny reality itself out of political spite.

This campaign has been weirdly perverse in its mockery. Seattle Times cartoonist David Horsey recently tossed off a visual of the reality-denying swing voter, rendering him as a pudgy, confused hominid in the mode of Monty Python’s duncelike Gumbys. Having negative feelings about “the best performing [economy] in the world” is equivalent to denying who won the Super Bowl:

When the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago ran “What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data,” I thought the “It’s not me, it’s you” framing had to be ironic, a spoof of these increasingly numerous “perception of the economy” pieces. Nope:

Noting that 74% of respondents in a recent poll said they felt inflation in the “past year” was going in the wrong direction, author Greg Ip noted flatly “it’s not true,” adding:

I’m not stating an opinion. This isn’t something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year.

Ip might be technically right about the last year of inflation, but I’m not sure how many finance writers want to be in the business of deciding who belongs in the “reasonable people” club, given the last twenty years of unpunished thievery on Wall Street. One could argue a reasonable person would have marched on Manhattan and started defenestrating bankers ten years ago:

Many of these articles are about inflation, so it needs pointing out that the CARES Act, a Fed-fueled bailout plan with major inflationary ramifications, passed on Donald Trump’s watch. It was bipartisan, but I was critical of it and spent much of 2020 traveling the country for a never-published project on the unfortunately enormous universe of Covid-era finance scams. Voters may trust Trump more because his pre-Covid economy was better, and he’s signaled he at least listens to public frustrations by criticizing institutions like the Fed, but Biden made moves he should get credit for, too (like trying to lift the bar on bulk pharmaceutical negotiations). Debating which president is better is irrelevant, though. This “perception” campaign is 100% about press douchebags demonizing people who’ve been screwed before, during, and after Trump.

Especially in the last two decades, the public has been served one financial “shite burger” after another (see today’s Q&A with Chris Irons a.k.a. Quoth the Raven for more). They’ve been ripped off by everyone: banks that sold defective mortgage securities to their retirement funds, pharma companies that charge them thousands per course of medication, private equity titans who strip healthy firms for assets and vaporize jobs, all phenomena that widened inequality and were enabled by hyper-aggressive monetary “rescues” and stimulus programs like Quantitative Easing.

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Some of these articles even show a big reason why stats might not matter at the ground level, but go on to rip the irrational voter anyway. “American economic pessimism has been bafflingly persistent despite major indicators showing that the economy is actually strong,” wrote Vox last month, in yet another piece about “Gaps between perception and reality” in the economy. That same article showed a graph from the Fed charting consumer credit balances:

That graph by itself explains the American pucker factor. Commentators refuse to see it. They also won’t grasp that public mistrust usually has less to do with one-time calculations at the supermarket register than with decades of accumulated frustrations about the increasingly numerous aspects of American life that are straight-up scams, or guaranteed income schemes for failure-proofed rich.

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LINK

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Unless pols are ready to take on the "hard stuff" (like Social Security and the Military), it doesn't matter. That's the point.

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You just live being obtuse

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There is no "easy stuff" at this point

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That’s an absolute lie.. you are fully aware of the broad wasted millions within government spending….you just don’t care bc in your mind it doesn’t matter. It’s very simple… If you aren’t willing to do the easy stuff, you won’t attempt the hard stuff.

yes

So, new spending is irrelevant?

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Imagine believing flooding the nation with millions of immigrants, forgiving billions in loan debt, and continuing to fund billions in munitions isn’t massive new spending? It’s almost like you are clueless

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Literally all of 2020 says hold my beer. Trump was in charge in 2020 even though his supporters try and act like his Presidency ended in 2019.