…
Ms Ellis works full-time as a nurse’s assistant and has a second part-time job.
But she needs to economise. She has switched stores, cut out brand-name items like Dove soap and Stroehmann bread, and all but said goodbye to her favourite Chick-fil-A sandwich.
Still, Ms Ellis has sometimes turned to risky payday loans (short-term borrowing with high interest rates) as she grapples with grocery prices that have surged 25% since Mr Biden entered office in January 2021.
“Prior to inflation,” she says, “I didn’t have any debt, I didn’t have any credit cards, never applied for like a payday loan or any of those things. But since inflation, I needed to do all those things…I’ve had to downgrade my life completely.”
The leap in grocery prices has outpaced the historic 20% rise in living costs that followed the pandemic, squeezing households around the country and fuelling widespread economic and political discontent.
Unless the president does something monumentally stupid (like telling people not to wear masks during a pandemic) the president has little impact on the economy (or oil prices). Why do people keep talking about the president like he’s got a great big series of valves that controls the economy? It’s ridiculous!
Any decision the president makes that will impact the economy is most likely to have an impact ten years later. Sometimes an impact can be felt sooner than that but it’s usually not a good thing for the economy… Like starting a war or closing the borders.
Yeah they also say it started when he took office but it definitely started during the pandemic when someone else was president. I don’t understand why it’s always framed like that. This inflation is a direct result of the pandemic response. But somehow they think the guy who caused it could fix it? Insane
You should know why it’s framed that way. This is a political piece, designed to make Biden look bad.
TLDR 3.5 trillion new dollars into the economy because of COVID
That’s why we have super high inflation…
But if you listen to my dad talk it’s
Biden no talk good and bad at president.
This would make sense if all those printed dollars went to regular people who then spent it on groceries, thus driving up demand, but that’s not the case. The distribution of money matters as much as the amount that exists. Biden isn’t the cause regardless, but I don’t buy the excuse that money printing alone caused this.
not really. pushing the fed to drop interest rates for no reason so that when an emergency like a pandemic happens they are at zero and can’t be dropped a bit can have an impact.
Because it’s easy to blame the president who simultaneously is ineffective in controlling the difficulties in your daily life while also being the cause of those same difficulties.
Didn’t you hear? The supreme court said the president is basically a king now /jk
No but real talk, you are right. People put way more importance on a presidential election than what it’s in reality. I mean, its super important, but he doesn’t drive the country like a fucking bus, it’s more like hes the admiral and the country is a fleet of ships that all need to be coordinating with one another.
If people want really change, then they need to put as much importance to local elections of all levels as they do for the presidential election… hell, maybe put slightly more importance to the local elections.
Also, as a simple demonstration…I vote for Biden!
There, that’s exactly the same thing as voting for Biden in the coming election. I’m not saying don’t, because god forbid Trump fucks this country over once more. No, what I’m saying is:
#1 let’s vote via phone constantly… Oh the public hasn’t agreed with anything you did for 3 weeks? GTFO, you gave it a good try!
#2 currently we don’t actually vote for the president or in any direct way actually do for him. The electoral college does, we don’t. The electors are not mind controlled by anyone, they literally could give us the finger and vote Trump into office.
#3 if we voted electronically via our phones, we would still not influence the election of the president in a direct way, so why the hesitation to make elections faster and less expensive?..is it because then we would really know how we all feel?
Watch some of Larry Summers talks - he predicted this inflation as Biden was gearing up to pass the IRA. He bailed out deadbeat students, screwing over people like me who worked their way through college. This increased the amount of money circulating in the economy. Then he printed trillions of dollars to hand out to folks, increasing it even more.
Biden’s policies directly contributed to and exacerbated inflation, rewarding irresponsible actors and punishing responsible ones. Even democrats and progressives (such as Larry Summers) can see this.
In case you don’t know, Larry Summers was Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton and Director of the National Economic Council under Obama (and the President of Harvard in between) - so this isn’t some far out right-wing talking point. Biden wanted a big bailout bill to take credit for, and he fucked the economy in the process.
Edit: I see downvotes, but no rebuttals. So I’ll double-down with links to the interviews I’m referencing.
- NBC News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F0cj73MNUU
- Bloomberg News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uxbbFiiqxE
- Jon Stewart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU3rGFyN5uQ
I don’t think anyone’s bothered because of how obviously wrong what you’ve written is to anyone with a decent memory.
Inflation had already peaked when the inflation reduction act was passed in August 2022. It had already blown past 9%. Predicted means guessing something before it happens, not after. Inflation decreased steadily after the act passed. If you’re trying to argue that it stopped it from slowing down faster that would be pretty silly when America had a relatively better recovery from inflation than most countries. You’re also blaming more inflation on a mass student loan forgiveness that never even happened. Unless you’re blaming public service loan forgiveness and stuff.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi_08102022.pdf
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273418/unadjusted-monthly-inflation-rate-in-the-us/
But no, go on about how something Biden did magically created global inflation. /sigh
also, and I will keep beating this drum, obama had the fed rate at 2.5 about when he left office and trump whined and bullied the fed to bring it to zero just before covid because they where “conspiring” to ruin his economy. fed rates should only be lowered when there is cause (like a pandemic) and not because he want stock market to go burr. idealy its raised and lowered slowly but because trump pushed it unnaturally low we had to have the sudden big jumps under biden.
Not a single rebuttal to any of the points raised in the interviews I linked…
Sad.
my rebuttal is https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-chart . Rates are supposed to keep the market from overheating like it did under trump which causes massive inflation. It should not have been zero going into covid and ironically covid is the reason it did not hit more into trumps term.
Your “points” are false opinions and outright lies that don’t deserve a rebuttal.
This is why I worry that Republicans will win: bc they have mastered the “truth” that facts don’t matter so much as campaign commercials.
And apparently journalists also, e.g. that line "They can’t buy groceries anymore. They can’t.” - I mean… there are cheaper options that don’t involve going into debt to purchase goods on a literally weekly basis.
Even here in the Fediverse, we send them clicks and spread the message for them. E.g. when the woman says:
“I know he’s a big fat mouth,” she says of Mr Trump. “But he at least knows how to run the economy.”
Whereas in response the reporter tried to be “fair & balanced” by saying that:
Mr Biden has claimed, incorrectly, that inflation was already at 9% when he entered office. It was 1.4%.
There is no reason to give either of these statements the time or day, but instead they spread them as “newsworthy”.
I guess it’s my own fault for remaining subscribed to this community, if this is the content that regularly appears here.
As a note: you did notice this is from the BBC, right? As in the British Broadcasting Company?
I’m not entirely sure the BBC is Republican-captured media, though I’ll tend to agree that their style guide leads to reading an awful lot like conservative media.
Thing is a lot of the media corpo right came out of britain, australia, and canada. IE murdock, black. They found they could grow the stuff better in the US and then it made it easier to take root once they export it to the more liberal countries.
Such a misleading way the story is written. Also a failure to mention that inflation was a global phenomenon, that it was brought down faster in America than most other places, that it was able to be brought down without a recession as was widely predicted which would have been far more devastating, that wage growth has compensated for inflation and then some, that wage growth was highest for hourly and low income workers, and a failure to mention the responses made by congress and the president to help inflation. So much important context left out.
Barely a mention of the fact that all of Trump’s polices are the exact opposite of what you would do to help inflation. That his tarrifs alone will raise this person’s costs by $1700 a year. Why don’t they ask her what she thinks of Trump’s tarrifs costing her $1700 more a year if he takes office? They could mention how his first term policies including pressuring the federal reserve for unnecessarily low rates created a dangerous environment for inflation before the pandemic kicked it off.
But all they can say is, just, I dunno, inflation was fine when Biden took office. In March 2021 prices were already increasing by 0.6% a month from the month before, a 4.8% annualized rate. Comparing to the year before is an average of the past 12 months of change combined. The month to month rate is a much better way to see how it’s changing when it’s changing rapidly. They were begining to accelerate before Biden did much of anything, and not to mention this occurred simultaneously around most of the globe.
Anyways, journalists can’t be bothered I guess. Everyone always wonders why people think Republicans are better for the economy despite all the evidence to contrary. I think a lot of it is lazy journalism that just regurgitates opinions and polling instead of researching facts.
From https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/inflation-higher-biden-rising-pay-makes-rcna158569 :
“Cumulative wage growth since the start of the pandemic has outpaced price growth across the wage distribution, but the most wage growth has been among lower-wage workers,” Bank of America economists wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. “This is likely because labor shortages have been the most acute in blue-collar sectors. While recent wage growth has been distributed more evenly across the distribution, the large cumulative wage gains for lower-income consumers since 4Q 2019 have buffered them against the inflation shock.”
I admit that every time I buy groceries, I am shocked by the prices. The thing is: I don’t blame the President for it. I blame lax regulation that has allowed monopolies to take over everything and pay workers as little as possible – particularly by misclassifying them as contractors. I also blame the Supreme Court for ruling in favor of the rich and powerful instead of the the citizenry and/or the institutional expertise within the government (EPA, NIS, etc.).
I’m frustrated that it seems the only people who can garner enough attention to get elected are ALL saying nice things to their base, then creating legislation and/or voting to take power from governmental regulators and experts and just let big businesses so whatever they want – which ALWAYS boils down to stripping as much money and power as they can from the populace.
Have some links:
Also… inflation is always there. My parents made a laughable amount of money together compared to what I make. The only difference is time. Once time passes your income becomes smaller than the new generations. Thus making you eventually homeless after retirement.
I hope these words help others understand how inflation is another tool to make us work our ass off during our useful life and then make good riddance of us after we’re no longer useful.
This is why you save money while you’re working and plan for retirement inclusive of inflation. You retire with a fixed income that is built with annual inflation in mind. It’s not “designed” to keep anyone poor. That’s utter nonsense.
Was it only me that was told in school to avoid using the word “But” at the start of a sentence? I break that rule quite often, but this BBC article starts many paragraphs with that.
To address the article itself: Payday loans are awful and lead to ruin. If you’re at the point where they’re your only option, you’re already screwed.
If someone thinks that Trump as President is going to make things better, that is very much delusional thinking. No matter that you lose your rights, your immigrant friend or family members getting kicked out for no reason, and your country sold to Republican connected contractors! At least you get sent a $1000 cheque from the US treasury as a special bri-, I mean ‘gratuity’.
A lot of “rules” taught in high school writing classes are more stylistic choices. They’re not necessarily wrong. Some of them might help to improve clarity, or a rule might help encourage new word choices so writing doesn’t sound so repetitive. Lots of reasons. But many are more for style. Hey I did it! I even made a sentence with only an implied subject and verb, naughty.
I would also argue that sometimes a period followed by a conjunction can be the best stylistic choice. Maybe the sentence was already getting too long and a break was needed, but you still wanted to draw contrast. Maybe you could have put a comma but wanted an increased emphasis on what comes after but. A lot of these things are just preference or style though. Like “never ending a sentence with a preposition.” Of course you can end a sentence with a preposition, but you might want to make sure what the preposition is referring to is clear to the reader too.
Very insightful, thank you. You can tell I didn’t become a linguist.
trump making it better would be pretty delusional given the inflation was just after biden took office and has not been that bad in the last year. it drives me nuts that folks don’t understand fed policy and what interest rates did between the end of obama and the start of biden. Interest rates were at two and half at the end of obama and instead of being 3 or more when covid hit they were zero. ugh.
I often see the 25% figure cited, but my own receipts have shown 50%+ increases in the same time period. I never buy brand name or much in the way of snacks. Is the 25% figure obtained by making substitutions like switching to store brand? I don’t have much leeway there since I already go for no frills groceries. I would be very interested in knowing how they determine “only” a 25% increase in prices over that period of time.
The quality of store brand stuff seems on the decline as well.
This time around, issues such as immigration and fitness for office are also top of many voters’ minds, while economic trends appear to be moving in the right direction.
Grocery prices were up just 1% over the past 12 months, well within historic norms; and the cost of a few items, including rice, fish, apples, potatoes, and milk, has even come down a bit.
As major chains such as Target, Amazon and Walmart announce price cuts in recent weeks, there are signs the situation could continue to improve.
Some analysts also expect wages, which have increased but trailed the leap in overall prices, to finally catch up this year, providing further relief.
“We’re on the right track,” says Sarah Foster, who follows the economy for Bankrate.com. “Wage growth has slowed, price growth has slowed but, you know, prices are slowing at a much faster rate than wages.”
Stephen Lemelin, a 49-year-old father of two from Michigan, another electoral battleground, says he was pleasantly surprised by lower prices on a recent supermarket trip.
Whatever his concerns about the economy, the military veteran says his support for Mr Biden, who got his vote in 2020, has never been in doubt, given that he sees Trump as a threat to democracy.
“Nobody likes high interest rates or high inflation but that’s not under presidential control,” he says. “If you know politics, there’s really only one choice.”
“We’re on the right track,” says Sarah Foster, who follows the economy for Bankrate.com. “Wage growth has slowed, price growth has slowed but, you know, prices are slowing at a much faster rate than wages.”
total horse shit
went to the grocery store two weeks ago and prices were higher than the previous week and this week the price seems higher still and wages seem like they are getting smaller
“We’re on the right track,”
They, the owning class whose mountain of wealth just keeps growing at our expense, and their short sighted mouthpieces, are. That’s all that matters to those who value money more than people.
For me they are higher than a year or two ago and has been somewhat steady this year. Still you can sorta tell its rocky. Ironically I find nicer stuff is actually sorta a bargain now vs the lower quality stuff. The difference in the price is not as much. Basically there is more competition for the rock bottom and not as much for the somewhat decent. You really see this in restaurants where fast food is just kinda slightly less than getting a real meal now.
if you plebs don’t downgrade how will we subsidize billionaires and corporations?
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A surprisingly even-handed article. Figures that the BBC seems the most capable of fairly reporting American domestic news.
