The administration in charge (as recently as yesterday) still blames Biden for issues happening on their watch, even though he hasn’t been in officer for 16 months now.
This is not an administration serious about governing, and until we have an administration serious about governing and taking responsibility for their actions, we will continue to have this situation where half the country blames the half not in power for decisions it is making.
Congress of course is somehow worse, as instead of treating the executive like a branch of government they are meant to have oversight of, they abdicate their oversight role and roll over to the wishes of the present administration.
The net effect is those of us that live paycheck to paycheck (which is 2/3rds of Americans) are caught in the middle of a situation that would be deemed fantastical and not realistic to write about if it was described in a dystopian novel.
The Iran war continues with no oversight from Congress, and no authorized war while we pay the price. Vote them all out.
The Biden administration isn't the antidote to our problems.
Disparaging democracy doesn't work. Saying shit like this is worse than not voting.
EDIT: Downvoted for defending democracy. I do love democracy :-D
Representatives in ancient democracies were selected by sortition, which is based on statistics, not popularity or money.
We've already made most consumer goods cheap.
The goods/services that are more inflation tied - food, transport, medicine, housing, and education.. are those tethered tied to physical world where costs are driven by energy, regulatory issues, and skilled domestic labor.
All you hear is reporting about Trump's daily contradictory statements, "leaks" in Axios that peace in Iran is imminent, then 40 tomahawk missiles. Next are probably fake peace talks again.
Until the press grasps that the US establishment wants a protracted forever war that hurts the EU, Japan, and India, no change will occur. The US wants to force investment of these countries in building valuable industrial infrastructure in the US and shake them down with high US energy imports.
The US population is suffering collateral damage. The billionaires are willing to take that sacrifice.
This presumes way more competence at the top than we’ve got.
> US wants to force investment of these countries in building valuable industrial infrastructure in the US and shake them down with high US energy imports
Americans want lots of things. Current policy isn’t promoting those interests. Currently, the war in Iran is causing long-term demand destruction for the sort of energy products America exports among our allies.
That is the intended perception because the public figures are imbeciles. The people in the background are highly competent and controlling energy flows to US "allies" has been a priority issue since Reagan blew up a Soviet pipeline to Germany.
Or make the starting point the Suez Crisis when the US unseated Britain in the Middle East and took over.
What’s your evidence? Because nothing done recently has supported American hegemony, even among our allies. Many of whom yes, are buying a bit more from us energywise, but a lot more from others all while accelerating decarbonisarion.
It’s always nice to think someone is in charge. The truth is modern societies are too complex to control in this cartoonish manner for any meaningful durations. People who convince themselves it is and wind up in power demonstrate the folly of that worldview repeatedly.
CPI tracks retail costs and the cost of living, whereas PPI tracks wholesale costs. As such, PPI acts as an early indicator of future consumer inflation.
There is a fun Canadian paper on how they started intensely decoupling after 2001, alongside the rise of global multi-step supply chains [1].
[1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/261258/1/swp2022-05....
We may well look back at the attack on Iran as the American tipping point that caused the same kind of financial stagnation as Brexit caused for the UK.
Good chance we run the COVID inflation all over again
I know there will be a lot of commenters rushing in to breathlessly claim 'Inflation was worse under Biden!'. However, there is a difference between inflation being the result of a literal 'once a 100 year' global pandemic and Trump deciding to attack Iran because he needed to remove attention from his involvement in the Epstein files.
As a summary
* Jan 2025 - Inflation when Trump took office was 2.9%
* Jan 2026 - Inflation at 2.4%
* 30th Jan 2026 - DOJ releases the first major batch (3 million files) of Epstein files. Numerous mention of Donald Trump in the files are immediately highlighted. Trump rants and rails, calling it a 'witch hunt'
* Feb 2026 - New York times releases a bombshell report documenting that Trump appeared in the files 5300 times. [1]
* Mid Feb 2026 - Trump starts ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran
* 28th Feb 2026 - US attacks Iran
* June 2026 - Avg gas prices over $4, US CPI at 4.2% and rising rapidly. The PPI numbers in the article referenced by OP show that this is only going to get worse.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/us/trump-epstein-files.ht...
No, that doesn't mean over a long enough time horizon what most people think it means.
USD has declined significantly since 2017 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R), but what it buys has substantively changed.
- You couldn't buy continous glucose monitors, OTC hearing aids, home heart monitors using your cellphone or watch or countless medications that didn't exist in 2017 (eg. Journavx, the first non-opiod pain med, smart insulin pens, etc.).
- You couldn't buy noise-cancelling earbuds, generative AI, somewhat affordable electric vehicles, PT and medical advice from Youtube/AI, self driving vehicles, more reliable electricity from grid-scale store, Satellite rescue from your cellphone, etc.
The retort will be daily items are about 30% more expensive since Covid. This is the result of Federal and State policies that have little to do with the White House and everything to do with Congress and State Houses. As just one example... ask yourself why so much ag is grown in Western states with water shortages and so far from the rest of the country?
Because water is one of the cheapest inputs into agriculture. Growing almonds in California is a ~bad idea, but it's not a stupid idea.
The ancient Athenians knew that elections favored the rich. That’s why they incorporated selection by lot into their system. Our modern understanding of democracy has fetishized elections to the point that some voters might see hundreds of them in a year, including for positions that shouldn’t ever be elected (e.g. judges), while still having little to no actual civic power.
Oh totally agree. But also civic involvement. The returns to even small amounts of civic engagement in America are so ridiculously high because most of the population doesn’t do it. If like 5% more of the electorate called their electeds at least twice a year, that would represent a 25% increase in civic engagement, enough to break constituencies.
Out of control inflation? No healthcare? Endless war?
Just vote! You just have to vote for a democrat!
It's time to say no to these charlatans. If people lose hope in the system, that's when it can change.
Or a third party.
> If people lose hope in the system, that's when it can change
There's only 2 ways it can change: voting or violence. You're saying voting doesn't work. That means you're advocating violence.
We need sortition.
You do it via constitutional amendment, which is a popular referendum.
Fuck what the professional politicians think of sortition; do an end run around them, because professional politicians are the problem.
Get this accomplished in enough states, and then you have a level chance of doing an amendment to the US Constitution.
Aka...voting.
If you truly believe "voting doesn't work", as you first said (EDIT: that was someone else whose username starts with a "b" sorry), then this referendum won't go anywhere either.
There's a lot of thoughtful responses to your histrionics, I suggest you take a breath and actually engage with the ideas contained within them.
Sorry, can you please point to one of these thoughtful responses? I've seen one idea suggested: "sortition". But no ideas for how to get it peacefully without voting it in. I engaged with all these comments and asked this question.
"Voting doesn't work" is a cynical, doomerist, thought terminating cliche. I prefer that this kind of mind virus doesn't propagate. You may call my comments "histrionics". But instead I suggest you take a breath and think about where calling voting and elections "useless" leads.
But I would say that the voting that matters most is voting in primaries. Get rid of the ideologues and zealots on both sides; get some people who can think rather than just yell.
Key figures, wealth, etc. Shouldn't influence their power to this extend. The general public isn't silent, it's silenced.
It works fine to accomplish what it is intended to do: Pick a worker to hire.
The problem is that many assume it ends there and the employee will magically go off and do great things. That is not how it works. If you've ever worked with employees before, you'll know full well that you have to regularly communicate with them to keep them on track. Even if the most stellar employee in the world trying to do everything right will never be a mind reader.
When was the last time you spoke to the person you hired for the job of representative? I expect for most reading this, the answer will be never. That is what doesn't work.
You can merely lie and spend money and get elected and then do the opposite. Rinse and repeat.
See: John Fetterman.
It doesn't work. It's fundamentally broken.
It is not fundamentally broken. The model proves to work perfectly fine in other contexts regularly. The trouble is that you, along with a lot of other people, are looking for magic so that you don't have to get your hands dirty. The harsh reality is that magic doesn't exist, I'm afraid.
It is upto to the voters to see past this.
People complain about their choices. Meanwhile, there's atrocious turnout in the primaries which determine those choices.
"When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived."
to the anonymous scholar who first said, probably as a joke:
"If violence didn't work you didn't use enough".
Whatever you think of voting and democracy, the alternatives are far more unpleasant. Vote every time, without fail.
Add in the propaganda convincing 2/5th of the country to consistently vote against their own interests and fundamentally misunderstand core issues, and it is difficult to see what can be done in the next 10 years.
The USA has had a hostile takeover by oligarchs. We are a country who serves only corporations and those who own them. Regular people have been almost completely removed from the process
Regular people removed themselves when we chose cultural flashpoints over material wealth.
That said, you have to realize that this has been a very intentional propaganda effort by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades. Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort and the outcomes are predictable.
There is no evidence it was highly coordinated and many reasons to believe it’s emergent. Cable TV and then social media created systems competing for attention. The content originators became increasingly decentralized, increasing both diversity and ruthlessness.
> Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort
Historically untrue. Starving, uneducated masses are easy to repress. Distracted masses only so long as they look away. And I think we’re seeing signs the American voter isn’t looking away.
I disagree. It’s the corruption of democratic politics with money. And rage-based content providers (on cable TV and social media) who take any consumer/worker surplus and ram it into invented culture wars.
I think it is simply wrong on the facts that the national government has been primarily focused on raising national GDP and material well-being, or that it has done a good job.
The topic of growth is almost absent from campaign messaging, and investment in infrastructure for the future is a minuscule part of budgets.
If economic growth was the priority, we would see streamlined code and legislation throughout the country and focus on improving them. Politicians would be spending their time trying to figure out how to lower the costs of High-Speed Rail or Bridges or houses.
In the case of Obama, the GOP noted that their top priority was to make him a 1-term president and that meant attempted sabotage of any legislation that might make him look good.
Neither man were perfect presidents, but compared to the current regime it is night and day.
Ahh yes, the presidents from the other party, including the one currently in office, who runs arguably the most brazenly corrupt administrations in US history, having tripled his family's net worth in a single year is of course entirely blame free /s.
Americans simply do not wish to engage with reality any more, and that's why they're perfectly happy to elect a TV personality for a president who filled his cabinet with TV personalities who can do nothing more than LARP as statesmen.
I think your comment is another instance of this LARP, where the public can't tell the difference between reality and TV.
hilariously•1h ago
zeroonetwothree•1h ago
It's almost as if the choice between the two parties is no choice at all.
coldpie•1h ago
Hi, I live in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. You may have heard about what the Republicans in the federal government did here a couple of months ago! The only appropriate response to your sentiment would, rightly, get me banned from this website. Please think before you speak.
hilariously•1h ago
https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2026/06/11/minne... https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/06/02/floyd-family-attorn...
qwerpy•15m ago
After inflation maybe that one was more expensive!
hilariously•1h ago
Yep, no difference detected here, unless you have eyes or a brain.
phainopepla2•1h ago
The lesser of two evils is still evil
hilariously•1h ago
wat10000•43m ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
“The index for final demand goods moved up 2.8 percent in May, the largest increase since data were first calculated in December 2009.”
Granted, that’s a slice of an index. But it promotes a pattern: we’re heading into a place similar to 2022. Then, because of money printing (at the time blamed on supply-chain disruptions). This time, because of money printing amidst an engineered supply-chain disruption.
The takeaway is we’ve had a string of shit-for-brain Presidents since Obama.
elcritch•1h ago
1: https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1746565358/d11org/oq...
BowBun•41m ago
[1] https://www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved/campaign-with-oxfam/fi...
suzdude•57m ago
The current president the one causing the energy crisis, building another M2 bomb, and raising prices for consumer goods via taxes.
timacles•55m ago
piva00•53m ago
What is understandable about the current causes of inflation?