... I'm not exactly sure what are you trying to communicate. I'm absolutely for spending more on things that help disadvantaged people, but still, fundamentally that means more people needed to work helping disadvantaged people and less everywhere else to avoid inflation. (See NAIRU.)
There was already a pretty serious inflation in many places that did pretty serious lockdowns (for example Germany), well before the war.
And since the developed economies are very intertwined it's no surprise that the CPI curve for the US looks very similar.
And the likely causes are:
- the shift of spending from services to products during the pandemic
- plus overloaded the logistics networks which further increases costs
- the unexpectedly large stimulus bills
- not enough people getting the vaccine in time & no new vaccine version released to target new variants (so boosters are becoming less and less effective)
> I'm not exactly sure what are you trying to communicate.
When I read your response to my post, my Spidey Sense warned me that you might be trying to use the excuse for not helping the disadvantaged that is always trotted out... that we can't afford it. I tried to point out that the opposite is the case, that we can't afford not to help, and your mention of inflation is a red herring.
> more people needed to work helping disadvantaged people and less everywhere else to avoid inflation.
Don't need to hire people. Just send money on the magic castle's flying carpet. Extra credit: see Affordable Care Act, whose opponents swore would trigger massive inflation
> There was already a pretty serious inflation in many places that did pretty serious lockdowns
Pandemic response was a multidimensional challenge that went beyond lockdowns, and was botched in many of those dimensions.
> the shift of spending from services to products
Dunno about this, seems to me that much of product inflation was due to
> overloaded... logistics networks
Botched pandemic response
> unexpectedly large stimulus bills
Size was not the problem, but distribution. Botched pandemic response
there's a lot of slack in a lot of publicly funded sectors (from education, defense spending, research to various other social programs), where ACA style laws could help cut out rent-seeking intermediaries/vendors/other-artificial-bottlenecks (for example a pretty large chunk of public spending is going for buildings, their maintenance, transportation, energy costs, and so on, which all are high because of bad/missing/inefficient infrastructure, which is kept in that way because by lobbying and other kinds of selfishness)
but simply increasing the money supply and giving money to people to spend on healthcare will push prices up. (which also immediately means that the money that was just handed over to someone who needed to buy healthcare services gets less of it.)
just like you keep saying botched response... I keep saying botched spending :) yes, both can be true at the same time.
There was already a pretty serious inflation in many places that did pretty serious lockdowns (for example Germany), well before the war.
And since the developed economies are very intertwined it's no surprise that the CPI curve for the US looks very similar.
And the likely causes are:
- the shift of spending from services to products during the pandemic
- plus overloaded the logistics networks which further increases costs
- the unexpectedly large stimulus bills
- not enough people getting the vaccine in time & no new vaccine version released to target new variants (so boosters are becoming less and less effective)
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=cpi+yoy&v=202... [US]
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/embed/?s=grbc20yy&v=20... [Germany]