politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Left to their own devices, companies want to raise prices and always have. You need a way to explain why they didn't hike prices in the 2010s, when they were presumably just as greedy as they are now.
Put another way, inflation is about the loss of value of money itself, not individual prices going up. That's a matter of macroeconomics: government spending, money supply, trade, etc.
Because people tend to notice when one price goes up. They notice much less when there are multiple excuses and many prices are going up. It's a lot easier to refuse to buy one thing than it is to refuse to buy everything.
We don't have the kind of supply/demand price curve you read about in econ 101 because there are too many barriers to entry to starting any business. Once you're established, you can either choose to race to the bottom so that both you and your competitors lose money OR you can implicitly agree to set your prices about the same as theirs. So choose, do you like more money or less money?
Yes, it's partly inflation. And it's partly the PPP. But largely it's just greed hidden behind excuses with no real threat of PR fallout.
So your story is that when all other prices happen to go up, lots of greedy companies conspire to up their prices. But why do the initial prices start going up to kick this off? Cosmic coincidence? Or is it conspiracy embedded in conspiracy?
In macroeconomics, the motivations of individual firms don't matter, or at least we just assume all firm behave as self-interestedly as they can get away with. This was as true in the 2010s, when inflation was low, as today when inflation is high. What matters are things like fiscal policy, monetary policy, inflation expectations, etc. Not how greedy companies are -- we can assume they always are greedy.
You're apparently spamming similar replies without reading what you're replying to.