Because once the prices go up, they don't fall again without corporations reducing the costs. Inflation, real or not, caused things to go up - corporate greed causes them to stay there and we have very little we can do about it.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Just a thought, but maybe inflation wasn't driving the cost of goods. Maybe it was something else, like corporate greed, maybe...
Also, saying the median person's purchasing power is back to 2019 levels isn't a good thing.
Inflation isn't a separate thing from corporate greed, it's a measure of how much prices went up. The corporate greed is part of the inflation.
The reason we feel poorer is because the inflation outpaced wage rises for a number of years, ie. we're literally poorer, relatively speaking.
Also, “inflation is down” just means that it has slowed back to a more normal pace; prices aren’t gonna go down. Inflation is permanent (unless we have deflation but rich people will never allow that)
- Greed is checked by competition
- Competition got severely reduced during the pandemic
- The inflation is a result of the newly-unchecked greed, not merely a result of greed (which hasn’t changed)
While the spirit of your post is true, I think inflation is a lot of different things. Generally when people talk about inflation they are talking about the valuation of currency and buying power on a global scale... That doesn't include corporation inflation, nor does it include consumer prices.
This is one of those economic terms that gets thrown around a lot but everyone can be correct. Colloquially, while talking about "inflation", most people are talking about their own personal expenses, particularly among necessary goods, where it definitely applies, with CPI.
I'd just be careful speaking in absolutes here... Baseline economic inflation that is talked about in the news is different from conversational "inflation", but people often conflate the two.
Kind of one of those "all squares are rhombuses" things... Not all inflation is talking about prices that would be affected by corporate profits.
Inflation has already happened and wages haven't caught up, of course things seem expensive.
I am so sick of this canard being parroted incessantly that "deflation hurts the economy." But they never specify why, other than some nebulous bullshit about sales and consumption of stuff will slow down. So what they actually mean by that is that deflation hurts Wall Street and rich motherfuckers, neither of which are entities I as a private non-millionaire citizen actually give a flying fuck about.
Inflation has slowed, possibly, in that prices are rising more slowly and your dollar is being devalued a little less over time than it possibly was last year. But prices are going to remain as high as they are now or go higher, because reducing prices of goods would reduce corporate profits, and corporations have already determined that we will still (albeit possibly begrudgingly) pay the current prices for everything. Because we're all still doing it.
I’ve argued back and forth with my folks, random internet persons, and ChatGPT and consensus seems to be extreme inflation or deflation hurts the economy in different ways and mild of either is at about neutral.
Key word being "extreme." I don't think a return to roughly early 2019, pre-pandemic-clusterfuck levels will exactly set the world on fire.
When they say “inflation is cooling” it means inflation is still happening but not as fast. It doesn’t mean deflation is happening. Prices won’t come down until deflation.
Even the articles that try to explain it an understanding, but "deflation is bad for the economy" way still feel out of touch. "It's okay for you to struggle to buy food and pay rent because the opposite would be bad for the economy."
Edit: The promise of wages maybe rising someday to match higher costs haven't happened for me or anyone I know yet. The federal minimum wage hasn't increased to match inflation either.
Just replace "the economy" with "rich people's money" and you'll unlock the hidden meaning of those statements.
Inflation clearly was not the primary cause behind the multi-industry price gouging that has driven prices for just about everything sky high. It’s late stage capitalism, the corporations are too big and too powerful. Who will stop them? They are mask off at this point.
Having said that, there are things being done, an example being Biden’s threats to take the patents away from pharmaceutical companies that take taxpayer money and do this shit to Medicaid patients. He’s also mentioned in some of his recent speeches that prices are disproportionately too high, but I have yet to see anything that deters these out of control capitalists
Lower inflation mostly means the prices don't increase as much as they were.