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What the Upper-Middle-Class Left Doesn’t Get About Inflation
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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politics
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Should have known it was Michael Powell from the headline. Guy is a hack republican shill that pretends to be centrist.
Did you actually read the article? There was nothing Republican, conservative, or even centrist about it.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted, you're absolutely right. This article doesn't criticize Biden or the Democrats, just the pundits who want to gaslight working-class Americans. This guy clearly didn't read it.
Looking at his profile he's probably 13.
Lol, ok. Talk about someone who didn't read what they're talking about.
The entire article is an attack on "liberal economists", much like every Michael Powell article.
I've listened to literally hours of takedowns on how shitty of a "journalist" Michael Powell is. Not everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Hear that? No? Yeah.
You obviously didn't read the article. Read it, then tell us the part you agree with and which part you disagree with.
Wow what totally innocuous and unbiased dates
It's an article about Democratic analysts downplaying inflation during the Biden administration. What date range do you want him to use, the Gilded Age? Also:
He's not even criticizing Biden, he's criticizing pundits for telling Americans that their economic experience is wrong, a strategy Biden himself has moved away from. Either you judged this article before you read it or you care very deeply about Democratic PR consultants.
Gas prices are down 30% since June 2022. Dead even since March 2014. Why did he pick March 2020? Because it was the absolute lowest prices of the entire decade due to a global pandemic. Every date he picks to compare is arbitrary. It's not a comparison of "people felt good in 202X, and now they don't feel good. Let's compare the data." It's cherry picking.
Incorrect, gas prices have gone up again, and are projected to rise above the $4 per gallon mark by May.
Which is completely irrelevant for why people were feeling bad about the economy for the last many months.
Yeah, but Biden didn't become president in 2022 or 2014; he picked 2020 because Biden was elected in 2020, when gas was 50% cheaper. The increase isn't Biden's fault, but it's one reason why a lot of Americans don't feel like the economy got better during his presidency. He's looking at data from 2019/2020 to 2023/2024, AKA just before the last election until just before the next election. That's not cherry picking, it's just examining the relevant time period.
Also, you understand you're doing the exact thing the article is about, right? This whole-ass article is, "Democratic pundits think Americans should feel good about the economy because of [X data point], but if you look at [Y data point], you can see why they still feel like they're doing poorly." Your response is, "How dare he bring up [Y], doesn't he know about [X]?!?!?"
Maybe you're right about this guy is a conservative hack; I'm really not familiar enough with him to say. But I did read this article, and it's not a conservative hit-piece. It raises some really good points about why Americans are not responding well to liberal pundits' economic messaging. It doesn't at any point attack Biden's economic strategy, and even compliments him for addressing voters' concerns head on. It really looks like you just read the headline, saw the author, decided the article was anti-Biden without reading it, and are now trying to force evidence to fit that conclusion.
Not sure how to break this to you, but Biden was not elected in March 2020. He wasn't even president in 2020. The last 3 years isn't the last 4 years, which isn't the last 5 years.
My point is if Powell wants to compare dates in good faith, he would make them consistent and reflect on that. "Groceries are up X% in the last 2 years but gas is down Y% during that same time. Maybe people find groceries more compelling than gas." These are the types of things that legitimate economists and journalists do. Powell is not. He instead cherry picks smatterings of years to make the big numbers and incredulously claim that "smug liberals can't look at the data." But they are, and that's why they're baffled. He is just looking to dunk on "liberal elites".
Really shitty discourse to accuse someone of not reading the article when I'm literally quoting it, but do you.
He's not cherry picking random dates, he just using different dates to compare different data. If he had compared the gas prices from 2020 to 2022 in order to make the increase of prices seem higher than it was, that would be bad faith, but he didn't do that. If he had compared the increase of food prices between 2022 and 2024 while ignoring a large drop in food prices between 2020 and 2022, that would bad faith, but that didn't happen.
Bad faith is pretending that comparing the gas and food prices and randomly speculating on how they make Americans feel is something, "legitimate economists," do. Bad faith is saying that, "[Biden] wasn't even president in 2020," as though the state of the economy just before he took office isn't relevant to this conversation. Bad faith is pretending I said you never read the article when I clearly said you didn't read the article before you started criticizing it. But hey, you do you.