Some truth to that, but a lot of conflation. Post-pandemic inflation would not have been as severe if corporate America hadn't been moving production off-shore for years, lengthening the supply chains and thus the shortage of masks, stay at home living necessities at the beginning and general commodities when normal consumption resumed. Yes, there was somewhat of a spike in crime during the pandemic, but mostly domestic-related from people being confined at home and the stresses it brought. The rest of the "increased crime" is debatable since overall crime statistics do not substantiate perceptions, and the issues of violence surrounding social protests (from Black Lives Matter to January 6) and the push to moderate law enforcement have been more impactful, imho. A third factor on crime perception, I believe, is the great shift away from objective journalism that relied largely on print and broadcast media having large staffs to cover a wide range of topics that they had some expertise on, to an online streaming, personality-driven "news media" that has used objective news outlets as there source material without paying for it. Resulting in severe staffing cutbacks to objective journalism to the point where print media staffing is pared down to practically nothing and the cheapest, which is sending a cheap newbie to read the police blotter and fill space with crime stories. And "neighborhood website" chat rooms which largely project fear and misinformation by the paranoid, imho.
We live in a world of perception this century. I thought at the time that universal mandates on masking and vaccination (except for high risk areas like health care venues and confined public areas) was a mistake. I'm old enough to have lived through eras where public health quarantines for highly infectious diseases was routine, and the roll out of the polio vaccine. Both were largely done through public education, a public appeal for the community good, and I like to think we haven't become so self-centered as a society that it couldn't have worked again. But as soon as you began mandating it for everyone -- particularly for a vaccine developed in record rapid fashion using a relatively new process -- you just fed the anti-vax, anti-science, anti-nanny state crowd that already was out there.
Off my soap box, so no need to throw things.
