Economic Bullshit to the Right of Me . . .

In an article in The Guardian an admitted conservative was saying that it was time conservatives admit the economy is doing fairly well. But blithe statements like the following were included.

“Yes, prices are higher, but inflation is down from a 9% annual rate to about 3%, so whatever the Federal Reserve did to offset the treasury’s spending on fiscal programs seems to be working.”

As with most comments about economics there is a bit of a problem, or two, or three, or. . . . The implication was that the recent surge in inflation was due to the federal government spending to support ordinary people. (Remember the checks? Remember who insisted that his signature showed up on them?) Other than that I don’t know to what “fiscal programs” he might be referring.

And recent studies have shown that half of the inflation in that recent surge was due to corporations raising their prices far in excess of their increased costs. More than a few CEOs baldly claimed that they could raise prices all they wanted and could blame it on “inflation.”

The second implication in this single statement is that the actions taken by the Federal Reserve Bank are the primary or at least a major cause of the inflation subsiding. There is also no evidence of that being the case. The actions taken by “the Fed” actually targeted ordinary people (by raising mortgage interest raises, and auto loan rates, for example) while not affecting the morbidly rich and wealthy corporations who have been sitting on small mountains of cash.

While the intent of the article, at least on the surface, was to have critics of “the economy” become more factually based, many of the false assumptions of conservatives were still woven into the narrative.