There was an interesting article yesterday by @NickTimiraos about "How Democrats Blew It on Inflation", and how that contributed to the lost election. These are events we all remember, but they're distant enough that many people probably haven't put them all together. Biden was inaugurated in the midst of the pandemic and the massive supply shocks associated with it. Ports backed up, shortages of many items, etc. He immediately passed a $900 billion covid relief, and then a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. They basically did this because that's what Obama did when he took office after the great recession. But when you have too much government money chasing too few goods and services due to supply shocks, it was a predictable recipe for inflation — and everyone knew it at the time. They had a child tax credit, sent $1,400 payments directly to households, and directed $350 billion to states & municipalities. So you have trillions of dollars of government stimulus rammed through a broken economy. As a result consumer prices rose 20% under Biden compared to 8% under Trump — consumers could feel that. They talked about that. And guess who cast the tie breaking vote to get this $1.9 trillion stimulus bill passed? Kamala Harris. She even patted herself on the back for this on the campaign trail. Exit polling showed around 40% of voters surveyed saw the economy as their top issue. By the economy, they meant high inflation and high interest rates. Then on top of that they did another stimulus bill! The "Inflation Reduction Act". Hey, you know what would reduce inflation? Another massive government spending bill. Genius! So then inflation starts shooting up, which was entirely predictable. And the official messaging is that it's just "transitory". Sure, used car prices and stuff like that is shooting up... but that's ok because everything will just suddenly go back to normal. Well, it didn't. One funny exchange they mention in the article is that the White House was trying to convince Manchin to sign off on the IRA and the White House assured him "17 Nobel laureates said inflation would be transitory" and Manchin goes "You've got 17 educated idiots telling you what you want to hear" According to the San Francisco Fed, government spending accounted for 3 percentage points of the rise in inflation through 2021. These bills were a material contributor to the pain consumers saw. The Biden administration didn't take inflation seriously. They didn't understand the pain they were causing Americans. Instead they saw it as a communication problem. They needed to convince everyone inflation was transitory, and not actually keep inflation down. A number of policy changes they could have made, like reducing tariffs on some items enacted during the Trump era... they didn't do it, because they were afraid of the political backlash. More pain for consumers. Because the federal government did little to reduce inflation through fiscal policy, the federal reserve was forced to take strong action. We saw the sharpest pace of rate increases in modern memory in part because the federal reserve bank had to fight federal policy. A more holistic approach to combating inflation would be to align fiscal policy & monetary policy so that we don't need such stark monetary policy to account for irresponsible fiscal policy. Anyway, the point is... Democrats are all upset, crying, calling Trump Hitler... but we have to take a hard look at the Democrat party and realize that if you suck at your job, you're not fit to govern. The other guy is a rapist, a felon, a douche, Nazi, whatever name you want to call him sure... but if you're just utterly incompetent at your job in a way that harms millions of Americans, we're putting the other guy back in charge. Yeah, we get it — he's so horrible. But how about your track record? I think the Democratic party needs to take a good hard look at itself and realize that the right to govern will come only from governing well. Not from being more woke than the other guy.

basically democrats just shit the bed and you can go back and look at what people were writing back then and everyone was like uhhhh this is going to cause inflation