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Post by the Scribe on Feb 26, 2024 15:05:07 GMT
INFLATION TALKING POINTS
Republican senator Tom Cotton blames inflation on Donald Trump’s poor selection to lead the Federal Reserve. He places the blame for inflation squarely on Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman. “Mr. Powell’s Fed has forced millions of American families to choose whether to pay the mortgage, feed their families, fill up their gas tanks, heat their homes or buy Christmas presents,” he argues. The reason Powell has the job in the first place is that Donald Trump appointed him. Once in office, Powell was an inflation dove, leaving interest rates low in order to run the economy hot. Trump was constantly demanding Powell push interest rates even lower.
Cotton’s view implies that Powell was wrong, and Trump was even more wrong: Cotton takes the position that keeping inflation low is the only objective of monetary policy. “The Fed’s core mission is to ensure stable prices and a sound currency,” he writes, omitting any role for balancing low inflation with low unemployment. Cotton is telling us that inflation levels are Trump’s fault, not Biden’s.
nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/jerome-powell-inflation-federal-reserve-tom-cotton-trump-biden.html
6. Inflation
Inflation has been a persistent challenge for the Biden administration. A rapid run-up in prices after the pandemic resulted in the highest inflation in more than 40 years. Americans have been pinched by higher costs for just about everything, including groceries, gas, cars and health care.
Although inflation has recently come down from last summer’s peaks, prices are still about 3 percent higher than they were a year ago. Many Americans say higher costs have tainted their views of the economy, with voters consistently citing inflation as their top economic concern.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/23/trump-biden-us-economy-compared/
in Biden’s first three years, food prices increased by 20.3%. That rise stemmed from the same causes that drove overall inflation higher — supply-chain difficulties during and after the coronavirus pandemic, exacerbated by policies Biden pursued early in his presidency that put more money into Americans’ hands when goods supplies were limited.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 3, 2024 6:03:56 GMT
Blame inflation on Donald Trump’s poor selection to lead the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman. Mr. Powell’s Fed has forced millions of American families to choose whether to pay the mortgage, feed their families, fill up their gas tanks, heat their homes or buy Christmas presents . The reason Powell has the job in the first place is that Donald Trump appointed him. Once in office, Powell was an inflation dove, leaving interest rates low in order to run the economy hot. Trump was constantly demanding Powell push interest rates even lower. Powell was wrong, and Trump was even more wrong: keeping inflation low is the only objective of monetary policy. “The Fed’s core mission is to ensure stable prices and a sound currency omitting any role for balancing low inflation with low unemployment. Inflation levels are Trump’s fault, not Biden’s.
Biden’s policies and spending was an attempt to deal with the mess left by Trump and the GOP. In the short run he may have overdone it but in the long run it will have untold benefits for average Americans. Don’t you find it interesting that Powell kept interest rates historically low under Trump but began to raise them as soon as Biden took office?
Most of the above came from a republican senator from Arkansas who when I type his name my posts get rejected. Not sure what it is about his name that sets yahoo off but his first name is Tom.
Evidently, "He Who Must Not Be Named"
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 3, 2024 6:17:38 GMT
INFLATION TALKING POINTS
Blame inflation on Donald Trump’s poor selection to lead the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman. Mr. Powell’s Fed has forced millions of American families to choose whether to pay the mortgage, feed their families, fill up their gas tanks, heat their homes or buy Christmas presents . The reason Powell has the job in the first place is that Donald Trump appointed him. Once in office, Powell was an inflation dove, leaving interest rates low in order to run the economy hot. Trump was constantly demanding Powell push interest rates even lower.
Powell was wrong, and Trump was even more wrong: keeping inflation low is the only objective of monetary policy. “The Fed’s core mission is to ensure stable prices and a sound currency omitting any role for balancing low inflation with low unemployment. Inflation levels are Trump’s fault, not Biden’s. (this was from an op ed by Republican Tom Cotton)
Biden’s policies and spending was an attempt to deal with the mess left by Trump and the GOP. In the short run he may have overdone it but in the long run it will have untold benefits for average Americans. Don’t you find it interesting that Powell kept interest rates historically low under Trump but began to raise them as soon as Biden took office?
Republican senator Tom Cotton blames inflation on Donald Trump’s poor selection to lead the Federal Reserve. He places the blame for inflation squarely on Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman. “Mr. Powell’s Fed has forced millions of American families to choose whether to pay the mortgage, feed their families, fill up their gas tanks, heat their homes or buy Christmas presents,” he argues. The reason Powell has the job in the first place is that Donald Trump appointed him. Once in office, Powell was an inflation dove, leaving interest rates low in order to run the economy hot. Trump was constantly demanding Powell push interest rates even lower.
Cotton’s view implies that Powell was wrong, and Trump was even more wrong: Cotton takes the position that keeping inflation low is the only objective of monetary policy. “The Fed’s core mission is to ensure stable prices and a sound currency,” he writes, omitting any role for balancing low inflation with low unemployment. Cotton is telling us that inflation levels are Trump’s fault, not Biden’s.
nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/jerome-powell-inflation-federal-reserve-tom-cotton-trump-biden.html
6. Inflation
Inflation has been a persistent challenge for the Biden administration. A rapid run-up in prices after the pandemic resulted in the highest inflation in more than 40 years. Americans have been pinched by higher costs for just about everything, including groceries, gas, cars and health care.
Although inflation has recently come down from last summer’s peaks, prices are still about 3 percent higher than they were a year ago. Many Americans say higher costs have tainted their views of the economy, with voters consistently citing inflation as their top economic concern.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/23/trump-biden-us-economy-compared/
in Biden’s first three years, food prices increased by 20.3%. That rise stemmed from the same causes that drove overall inflation higher — supply-chain difficulties during and after the coronavirus pandemic, exacerbated by policies Biden pursued early in his presidency that put more money into Americans’ hands when goods supplies were limited.
www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/feb/13/donald-trump/donald-trump-exaggerates-rise-in-food-prices-under/
About $42 trillion in new wealth was created in the first two years of the pandemic. Two-thirds of that has gone to the richest 1% of the world’s people, with billionaires a third richer now than they were before the pandemic. It’s no secret that it’s a lot easier to make money when you already have money.
What typical people in this country have is based on their income and what they make in the labor market but that’s not the case for the superwealthy, Those at the very top are making kinds of investments because they have the money: real estate, in companies, in the stock market, all of which have gained a huge amount of value in the pandemic.
The stock market boomed through 2021. Companies did extremely well. They benefited from [Federal Reserve] policy, from low interest rates and from necessary government spending. And when companies did extremely well, so did the very rich. And that’s because the bulk of stock in this country, of shares, are owned by the wealthiest households. Upwards of 70% of all stock is owned by just the top 5% of richest households,
But it’s not just that the rich own a lot of stock and the stock market did well, Kinder said. It’s also what many of the big companies that made the most money in the early days of the pandemic — companies like Amazon and Walmart chose to do with those profits. These companies spent five times more rewarding their shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks than they did raising pay for all of their workers.. In many countries, inflation outpaced wages for most workers with hundreds of millions of people unable to afford the cost of living.
At every turn, we’re seeing inequality widen as a result of this pandemic but it’s not inevitable because It comes down to political and policy choices particularly around taxes and who pays what. In the U.S. and many countries around the world, the richest people typically pay a lower tax rate han the middle class.
The wealthiest 400 billionaire families in America paid an average of just 8.2 percent of their income—including income from their wealth that goes largely untaxed—in Federal individual income taxes between 2010 and 2018. That’s a lower rate than many ordinary Americans pay.
This disparity is driven largely by the way our tax code treats income generated from wealth—that is, income from assets like stocks that increase in value over time. When a middle class American earns a dollar of wages, that dollar is taxed immediately. But when a billionaire makes a dollar because their stocks increase in value, that dollar is taxed at a preferred rate—if it’s ever taxed at all. If a wealthy investor never sells an asset that has increased in value, those investment gains are entirely ignored for income tax purposes when the assets are passed on to an heir.
The President’s Build Back Better agenda will help give working people a fair shot and restore fairness to our tax code—closing the loophole that allows income from assets to go untaxed forever and increasing the capital gains tax rate for the most fortunate. And it would also provide an historic middle-class tax cut—paid for by making those at the top pay their fair share—while ensuring that no one making under $400,000 a year pays a dollar more in taxes.
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