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Understanding Inflation.

Finally, a thread about raising the minimum wage mentions inflation. Those on one side claim that raising the minimum wage causes inflation. Those on the other side says the minimum wage should be raised because of inflation. It shows that few people understand (a) the definition of inflation and (b) the cause of it.
(Don't feel so bad. In the late Seventies, Gerald Ford had a campaign called WIN (Whip Inflation Now), as if the masses had anything to do with it. There were public service ads on television accusing people who want to spend money as being "PIGGY" and causing inflation. And these misleading campaigns were carried on by government and mass media, so don't necessarily blame yourself for not understanding this problem.)

Inflation is basically TOO MANY DOLLARS CHASING TOO FEW GOODS. If you have to tattoo that definition in your brain, then do it.

It helps to take a few macroeconomics courses in college to fully understand the economy. In this country (and I only mention America because I don't give a rat's ass about other countries) there is such a thing as the MONEY SUPPLY. There's a certain amount of dollars out there and the federal government (usually the Treasury Department) keeps track of that amount.

It is tied to output. If the government decides to flood the market with more and more dollars without output increasing, you get INFLATION.

How did UNELECTED JOE create the RECORD HIGHEST INFLATION IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, when he inherited an expanding economy with record LOW inflation? Very simple. He flooded the economy with a lot of unnecessary dollars, in the form of those "stimulus checks."

That's what did it.

Need a reference to follow this? (I don't expect blue state liberals to grasp this because their public schools barely prepare them for the fourth grade in a red state.)
https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/heritage-explains/the-real-story-behind-inflation

What do you know about inflation? Milton Friedman famously said: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” Of course, we all know the driver of the quantity of money is government spending priorities, and recently the government has been spending a lot. So what does that mean for the American people?
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Even Nixon admitted that wars are inflationary and he threw us a bone. Nobody in the duopoly wants to stop the degradation of the American public. They're just to the right of Nixon. So you gotta say, it's earned pain in murka. They stick with the duopoly that slays them.
Reason10 · 70-79, M
@Roundandroundwego Wars do not cause inflation. Wars do not flood money markets with more dollars than output. In war, (and FDR understood this enough to LIE to get us into a shooting war to help save the economy since his New Deal was destroying it) dollars PAY for munitions, so monetary expansion is indexed to output. Also, Nixon was WARNED not to take the world off the Bretton Woods Gold Standard, and he got that warning from OPEC. And that is because ALL oil is traded with the American dollar, which is the reserve currency of the world. He caused a problem with the integrity of the dollar and that is PRECISELY the cause of the first oil shocks in supply as well as the first price rises of the early Seventies. Nixon was the most liberal president in history. He made an Uber Leftist like Barak Obama look like Rush LImbaugh.