Originally Posted by
Extenda
this one always gets me. Some people were struggling, inflation for household goods was high. All this is true, but not for legacy airline pilots.
as a legacy pilot, you signed the most lucrative contract in history, you saw insane seniority movement, your equity in the stock market literally doubled, and your house price (if you already owned) nearly doubled as well.
Actually, the past couple of years, real (inflation adjusted) wages were up, & those improvements benefited low wage earners even more than high wage earners- meaning Americans had largely overcome inflation with low wage earners among those that benefited the
most from Biden’s economic policies. People just couldn’t wrap their heads around it because the sticker shock of grocery items still felt out of control to them. IOW, you had a bunch of people freaking out about $1 worth of eggs costing $1.20 when they were actually making $1.25 to every dollar they used to make- putting them better off than they were before.
Both Trump & Harris lied to the public that they would bring prices back down to pre-pandemic levels. First of all they had no mechanism to do that & even if they did, that would be deflationary & damaging to the economy. What we should really want in an inflationary economy is for real wages to meet or exceed inflation & for inflation to slowly calm back down to around 2%-3%, all of which had actually happened before the election; but Americans are idiots who couldn’t stop obsessing over a $5 hamburger costing $8 (or whatever generic metric is meaningful to you. )
Biden wasn’t to blame for the global production shutdowns that caused inflation under his term any more than Trump is to blame for bird flu & the cost of eggs, but again, reference Americans & their comprehension of economic causes & effects. Both are responsible for the rampant spending of their administrations & Trump will own whatever comes of his obsession with tariffs & what appears to be a desire to pay for dollars in corporate tax breaks with pennies of DOGE savings- and potential slashing of social safety nets (otherwise town as Ponzi schemes) like Medicare & SocSec. But those impacts take time to reveal themselves- years in some cases & by the time we are reeling economically from the same, we savvy Americans will be calling for the heads of whatever administration happens to be in office at the time, whether connected to the root causes or not.