Inflation Hits Another High, Marking Its Highest Level in 40 Years

Let's Go Brandon.

It jumped 7.5% since last February, the biggest year-over-year increase since the A-Team debuted. (My bad, that was 1983.)

Inflation has now hit the highest rate in 40 years, jumping 7.5 percent since last February, the biggest year-over-year increase since February 1982, more than experts had expected. Among the reasons that the AP blamed were "shortages of supplies and workers" as well as "heavy doses of federal aid." Paging Joe Biden, his mandates, and his spending, although, of course, they don't say that. Unfortunately, they're not expecting it to slow anytime soon.

Say, didn't Biden's Covid Response Team just demand billions and billions and billions more in new covid "aid" yesterday?

Norms are being restored, if the Norms you mean are the inflation and malaise of 1982. (Which did happen under Reagan, but it was required to wring out the stagflation of the Carter years.)

When measured from December to January, inflation was 0.6%, the same as the previous month and more than economists had expected.

There's always so much unexpected economic news under Democrat "presidents."

Boy, Democrat presidencies must be exciting times for analysts! So many unexpected plot twists!

Biden spent 2021 paying people not to work. When businesses complained that they were short-staffed because people were being paid not to work, Brandon told them to "pay them more" -- to compete as an employer with the government, which was paying people as a non-employer.

This would raise everyone's wages, he whispered. (And it was, in fact, a creepy whisper moment.)

But here's the thing that anyone who understands anything about economics understands:

If everyone's wages increase, especially when due to an artificial external factor like government forcing, then nobody's wages increase.

Because all that's actually happened is that the default wage -- the "curve," if we were talking about grades in a class -- has risen, and everyone is still the same distance from that point.

And when employers have to pay everyone more money, they raise prices, because their costs are obviously higher.

Or as the AP sugarcoats it: Higher wages "can pressure" companies to raise prices.

Which means the "higher wages" buy the same amount of product.

Which means they're not higher wages in real terms.

The dollar has just been reduced in value.

Wages are rising at the fastest pace in at least 20 years, which can pressure companies to raise prices to cover higher labor costs.

Manchin declared I Told You So:

Now let me tell you a little story.

The Democrats used to push a strategy of taxing the rich at very high levels, and then wasting that money by pissing it down ratholes they claimed was "social spending on the poor."

But under Clinton and then under Obama, the Democrat Party repositioned itself to be the party of the urban corporate elite and the mega-wealthy. And the urban corporate elite and the mega-wealthy do not like paying high tax rates.

But the Democrat Party still wanted to piss money down ratholes.

So the Democrat Party became enamored of a new "theory" of money: That they could literally spend as much money as they wanted, pissing it down ratholes, and not bother raising taxes on their mega-wealthy donors, because the government could just print as much money as it liked and never worry about balancing the books and nothing bad would ever, ever happen.

This is really their theory. It's called "Modern Monetary Theory" (MMT). They called it that because "Retard Money Theory" was already taken.

Now that this "theory" is being disproven by soaring inflation, people are... questioning it.

The New York Times recently ran a positive piece on this lunacy that you can literally run the mint's printing presses all day and night and see no negative consequences, and real economists are critical.

Here's the leftwing Obama economic advisor Larry Summers calling this obviously lunatic theory snake-oil:

One critic notes the MMT people do not really have a theory they can even write down, or that could ever be tested -- they just have unfalsifiable claims and slogans.

[A]ny attempt to engage with the actual substance of MMT quickly finds that such substance is curiously lacking. MMT proponents almost always refuse to specify exactly how they think the economy works. They offer a package of policy prescriptions, but these prescriptions can only be learned by consulting the MMT proponents themselves. There is no model here -- no set of equations or definite formal statements that a layperson could use to generate their own MMT policy prescriptions without appealing directly to the gurus.

...maybe MMT people don't write down models of the economy because they can't. Because as Françoise, Christian, Rondina, Palley, and others have concluded, MMT is not a theory of how the economy works, but rather a set of political memes to push for more deficit spending.

But here's the unexpected -- or the inevitable -- plot twist.

You may have noticed that the woman pushing MMT is, in fact, a woman.

You may have also noticed that the Current Year is 2022, and we must Believe All Women, including, especially, when they say stupid things that could not possibly be true, especially when these stupid things involve impossibilities of basic math.

And so:

Real MMT, like real communism, has never been tried. But today, Axios has published a piece titled "Male economists are freaking out over a NYT profile" that suggests the pushback against MMT is akin to mansplaining.

This Twitter-based econ fight is about more than one economist. It's an argument over a natural economic experiment -- the U.S. government spending unprecedented sums to keep the economy from free-falling during COVID.

And the gender dynamics-- male economists piling on against a female economist and a female journalist, Times' reporter Jeanna Smialek, in ways distinctive from typical academic arguments -- look terrible here.

Women are men's equals, but also, you're never allowed to criticize women and you also have to pretend they're right even when they're completely wrong or it's "mansplaining."

The Socratic Method

It's just mansplaining with questions.

22 "Critical Money Theory" would have just been giving the game away. Posted by: Warai-otoko

Colorado Alex says I've got the Retard Money Theory wrong:

That isn't even MMT. Even MMTs proponents agree that you have to remove money from the system via taxation. And you can't simply spend willy-nilly, because the spending has to result in an increase in GDP. This is just standard DC "spend everything!" politics dressed up in another cheap costume. It's no different than we've seen in previous years, just a lot more of it. Posted by: Colorado Alex in Exile

Joe Mannix says so too:

There's a *bit* more to it than that, but this is a mighty fine explanation crammed into just two paragraphs. I think it is worth pointing out, however, that George W. Bush may well have been worse than Clinton in this regard. Posted by: Joe Mannix (Not a cop!)

Frankly I feel like I'm being mansplained to, so... I'm right.

posted by Ace at 12:38 PM

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