Keinichn t1_iuj2133 wrote
Reply to comment by User_Name13 in Editorial: Better bet: Despite turbulent Senate race, Oz better prepared to lead by User_Name13
Inflation is typically caused by an increase in production, material, and/or logistical costs.
All three of those have increased worldwide over the last two years, some exponentially. Materials are more expensive worldwide, production costs are higher worldwide, shipping and supply chain costs have gone up worldwide. Demand is up, supply is down. That's another reason.
If it was solely due to national relief bills, inflation issues would limited to the US. They're not.
[deleted] t1_iuje8oq wrote
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User_Name13 OP t1_iuj40bw wrote
>Inflation is typically caused by an increase in production, material, and/or logistical costs.
You forgot a big one, labor costs.
Inflation is caused by overprinting a currency, like the US has been doing with the dollar the past 2.5 years.
You can't just print trillions of dollars out of thin air and expect your currency not to be devalued.
Look at Zimbabwe or Venezuela for a case study on runaway inflation.
Government's can't spend their way out of inflation, it's literally what got us in this mess in the first place.
It's supply and demand.
There's more dollars out there competing for products than there are actual products, so the price of those products is going to increase cuz there are more dollars out there chasing a finite amount of product.
The government printed trillions of dollars and handed it out to people, paying them to sit on the couch for over a year, instead of contributing to the economy for it like everyone else does.
My dollars that I worked for are competing with dollars that the government just printed and handed out for products.
That's why we are in this mess and we absolutely can't spend our way out of it, cuz that's how we got here in the first place.
If businesses have to raise wages to compete with the government that is paying people to sit at home, then they are going to pass that additional cost of business along to the consumer, further contributing to inflation.
That's why the government shouldn't pay people to sit around and do nothing, because it makes it harder for businesses to find workers.
Keinichn t1_iujhug1 wrote
It's like you completely ignored my response, namely the last little bit, and responded with the same argument you made earlier. I'll quote it again:
>If it was solely due to national relief bills, inflation issues would limited to the US. They're not.
The relief bills may have been part of the issue, but they did not cause nearly the impact you're thinking they did. I will say this a third time, hopefully you'll actually see and understand it: If the relief bills were the sole cause of the issue, other countries wouldn't be having inflation issues as well.
>the government that is paying people to sit at home
Which they are not doing any longer. They printed three checks. It wasn't enough money per person to keep someone afloat longer than a few months, much less two years.
Businesses have to raise wages because the labor pool finally got together and decided they were tired of working 40+ hour weeks at shit paying jobs.
>That's why the government shouldn't pay people to sit around and do nothing, because it makes it harder for businesses to find workers.
I don't think you have a full understanding of the big picture here. You seem to want to pin everything on a few checks totaling a couple thousand dollars per person that stopped getting sent out over a year ago. It's not people sitting at home being lazy. Many of them left their shit paying jobs and got better paying ones. Others went from a two income family to one income because they found a way to make it work. The rest have decided that $7.25 an hour isn't worth their time (and it isn't) so they're outright refusing to apply at places that pay that terrible and are focusing their efforts on places that pay an amount they can live off of.
Please, I mean this as a reasonable human being to another one. Please take the time to thoroughly research, from multiple sources across the spectrum, and use some common sense rather than what the political folks you follow spout out of their heads.
People aren't as lazy as you think they are. Businesses are more evil than you think they are. This issue is way more complicated than you're making it out to be, and it's even more complicated than I'm explaining it as. Just, please, take a few hours, set aside your biases, and dig into it from non-political sources. I've seen people that had the "people are lazy" view do a total 180 after doing that.
User_Name13 OP t1_iujk3q0 wrote
> If the relief bills were the sole cause of the issue, other countries wouldn't be having inflation issues as well.
Those countries also passed massive spending bills in response to Covid.
>Which they are not doing any longer. They printed three checks. It wasn't enough money per person to keep someone afloat longer than a few months, much less two years.
Did you forget the federally enhanced Covid unemployment payments people got? It was $600 a week by itself, and that was on top of whatever your state unemployment was.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/11/us/how-covid-stimulus-money-was-spent.html
$740 billion went to unemployment benefits.
Businesses had to compete with the government for hiring workers.
The government paid people to sit on their asses and it contributed to a massive labor shortage. If you give someone the option of either sitting at home on their ass and getting money for doing nothing or going into work and busting their ass to earn it, people will choose the free lunch.
Keinichn t1_iujl6tk wrote
From your source:
>Workers received nearly $700 billion in unemployment benefits, including an extra $600 per week from March to July 2020
The $600 per week lasted 4-5 months and ended over two years ago. You can rightfully blame it for hiring issues in the summer/fall of 2020, but it's absolutely not the cause for current and ongoing labor/inflation issues in 2022 as that money is long gone. Do you have a source that those payments are still ongoing or are you going to admit it's a more complex issue?
PhillyPanda t1_iuk7g6j wrote
Federal pandemic aid lasted through September 2021.
The $600 was reduced to $300 after a few months but the government was still paying people on top of unemployment.
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