After historic food price roses during a global pandemic and another round of bird flu in four years, you’d think a good president would do things to lower them, not continue to increase them!
I'm sure that somehow this is all Biden's fault though.
And there have always been aspects of using undocumented labor that are negative and exploitative and I'm all for the US government making real positive changes in this area, but any policymaker coming at this from a non-racist perspective that wanted to make real changes would do it by fining or charging the people who are hiring the immigrants.
Of course, that's not what the Trump administration has done or will do.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDSL#
It's due increase in money supply during Covid stimulus spending.
And later "Coffee prices have jumped more than 20% in the last year. And while some of that is due to weather in coffee-growing countries like Brazil and Vietnam, Trump's double-digit import taxes are not helping." if you want to pretend that your boy had nothing to do with it (because global trade wars have nothing to do with rising prices.)
While the question of alternative actions and outcomes is also valid, this is a literal 10-trillion dollar question that nobody in a leadership position wants to ask or answer.
But this is just a submarine anti-Trump piece. Everybody knows that groceries are expensive and why. The idea that annualized inflation rising to 2.9% in October when it was 3.0% in January is a huge failure for Trump is silly when he's actively pursuing policies that are expected to raise prices (tariffs and the deportation of workers that have no rights and are paid trash.)
Trump's failure is that he's simultaneously trying to cut the social safety net because he's a dumb libertarian at heart, surrounded by dumb libertarians, who engineer policy to serve their plutocrat sponsors (who aren't dumb libertarians) whims. They convinced him that he could get rid of the enormous number of illegal aliens to create a wage renaissance without spending a dime, but they aren't easy to get rid of. They're here, and they don't have anywhere else to go because we fucked up their countries. In fact, he's still fucking up their countries because he serves the people he golfs with. Even if you warehouse the illegals, all that's doing is keeping them from feeding themselves, and making them an even larger weight on the citizen economy. He even knows that most of them will have to be made citizens. At least the gate is closed for now.
He needs to put price controls on necessities hard, and start doing stimulus checks so hard that it looks like UBI. His goal is to lower the dollar anyway, print a ton of them and don't give them to the wealthiest people in the country who don't spend (or who "spend" on trash like the metaverse and AI being anything like AGI.) By that, I mean be better than Obama. People will forget that you reigned over the completion of a genocide in the holy land, and remember that you saved the West.
I've bought an $899 MacBook Air. I've bought a $229 65" TV. $20 handheld emulator. A lot of tools and random things from Amazon are still the same price.
But the house I bought was double what the one was in 2018. The car I haven't bought would be up 50%. Insurance costs are way up. Phone bill is the same.
Groceries are way up in general, certain things like meat basically doubled but Yogurt and cheese is still about the same price. Junk food like soda, cookies, and chips are double (thankfully I don't buy much). Potatoes, onions, peppers are still the same price.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...
1. Seed prices - there is a lot of patented GMO stuff in circulation and pricing around that.
2. Farm equipment - bigger equipment, more sensors and computers, higher costs (even around fixing things)
It would be great if there was some investigative reporting that covered all the angles.
bix6•1h ago
There’s some fascinating writing on this. It’s really private equity causing the price increases through supply chain control.