May 10, 2022

Economics is so fluid that it will allow pretense of any desired result for rationalizers. Therefore, it is the tool conservatives are focussing on to take back control of the government.

The starting point of the problem is that there is no objective subject matter to economics. It's about like the Green Martian disease. That means everything about economics is contrived. It's the reason why so-called economists have a wide divergence of theories—because there is no objective reality to define the subject.

Picking apart the subject is like analyzing a rotten tomato. But it needs to be done. The first point is the time element for economic problems. It takes a year or two for a causative action to show up in the economy, such as Trump's tariffs, and another year or two for the effects to be noticeable to the public. Which means all the complaining conservatives are doing in blaming Biden for the economic problems applies to Trump's agenda, not Biden's.

Biden cannot do much in regard to the economy, because presidents can't solve such problems. The problems are social and industrial, not governmental. As always, screwing something up is extremely, but solving the problems can be impossible.

Tariffs were promoted by Trump as the answer to everything. Supposedly, China would pay the expense, which would increase revenues for the U.S. Government, and U.S. corporations would have reduced competition. That view is beyond infantile stupidity. The U.S. public pays the price of tariffs as increased cost which producers have to pass along with the products. The U.S. corporations gained nothing, as the tariffs made their supply chains more expensive, and some corporations went under as a result. In other words, tariffs were a nineteenth century failure and beyond ridiculous now days. No mention of that fraud in the conservative bitching about the economy which they corrupted.

Another is the pretense that politicians tune inflation up and down. They can screw up the economy that way but never improve it, such as the 23% inflation produced during the late 1970s and 1980s by putting people out of work by increasing the basic interest rates.

What did Biden do to increase inflation? The entire cause of inflation is the cost of producing products. Incompetents screwing everything up is what increases the cost of everything; and conservatives are screw-ups and nothing else.

The assumption that the Federal Reserve can reduce inflation is a pipe dream of incompetents in economics. Putting people out of work to lower inflation is like destroying an automobile to make it run better. Which means economists and politicians have no ability to reduce inflation, though any corruption can increase inflation by screwing things up, as tariffs and increased interest rates do.

That means the problems related to inflation need to be fixed at the competence-of-production level, not the financial level. Ripping people off, the motive of conservatives, is how the competence-of-production level is decreased.

It takes increased rationality to improve production competence, while conservatives, as all corrupters, are fighting a war against the rationality that exposes then as the incompetent corrupters that they are.

Trump's standard of beating everyone up to get a better deal is also part of the problem. Beat-up persons are not as anxious to solve the problems of their enemies, which could be part of the reason why Asians used their factories to produce chips for toys instead of automobiles. In other words, it takes a lot of cooperative efforts to make complex technology work, and beating everyone up doesn't produce the cooperation that is needed.

(I beat up the corrupters with criticism, which doesn't stifle results. It improves results by linking to the laws of the universe and diminishing the frauds.)

One of the pillars of Green Martian economics is the claim that an increase in consumer demand is one of the causes of inflation. Increase in consumer demand is the goal of businesses. It's why they advertise. It increases volume of sales and lowers costs by improving efficiency of scale. But fake economics says businesses can't keep up with demand when it increases, as if the idiots were in a primitive country that lacks enough production to meet demands.

It's also one of the pillars of conservatives' propaganda. They claim they have to dump tax dollars onto businesses to improve the economy, as if they were in a totalitarian dictatorship where businesses were dependent upon government support for production. Free enterprise, they call it. They burned three trillion tax dollars on corporations that way during the Trump years, while the corporations had no use for the free cash and squandered it on such things as stock buy-backs, which used to be illegal, until conservatives threw out centuries of laws as so-called deregulation.

The only situation that can cause price increase to be arbitrary is elimination of competition, which primarily results from "Mergers and Acquisitions," which means companies buying up other companies allowing them to eliminate competition. So Democrats try to use laws to reduce such practices, while conservatives block the effort.

Mergers and Acquisitions is also the main conduit for sending money upward, because whenever one company buys another company, someone walks away with that much cash, while consumers re-buy the company. The new cash has no place to go but the stock market, related gambling casinos such as crypto currencies and venture capitalism, which put the banks out of the loaning business for industry and forced them into the gambling casinos.

"Quantitative Easing" is a newly created method of increasing the money supply by having the Federal Reserve synthesize money out of thin air, because banks used to do that through loaning, and industry no longer needs much for bank loans due to venture capitalists replacing banks with the overflowing cash that they acquire through Mergers and Acquisitions.

In other words, Mergers and Acquisitions are a major destroying influence over the economy, which is why they were restricted by laws created in response to the "Robber Barons" of the nineteenth century, until conservatives threw out such laws as part of Reagan's "morning in America."

The inability of conservatives to add and subtract is shown in their claim that the economic stimulus associated with the pandemic—sending more money to the states—is part of the cause of inflation. Any infantile would know that the more money anyone has, they less need they have to increase prices. Even if the government could not afford to do so (after Trump and conservatives burned $3 trillion tax dollars on corporations) no price increase results. Taxes that have to be paid in the future are unrelated to present price increases.

In other words, the conservative standard is to find something negative in their word salad and apply it to enemies no matter how ridiculous. It gets them elected by attacking enemies through fraud, not by solving anyone's problems.

Keeping out immigrants by Trump and the conservatives restricted the economy at two levels. It left a shortage of low class workers, particularly with large numbers of them dying from the Corona virus while working in assembly lines; and at the upper class level, specialists were kept out, where they were heavily drawn from foreign countries in the past. Trump assumed he was saving jobs for U.S. workers, when all he was doing was creating a shortage of workers which restricted competitiveness of U.S. companies and increased cost of production, which is part of the inflation that is occurring.

The most significant problem the U.S. has at this time is reduced competitiveness, which is the entire reason why corporations needed to go off shore and the reason why they aren't going to be re-industrializing in the U.S. It was the power mongering that conservatives promote that created the non-competitiveness by shoving rational persons out of the social structures and putting incompetent corrupters in their place while converting the social structures into power mongering traps of decadence. Trump finalized the process by stripping rational persons out of the bureaucracies and leaving nothing but a worthless shell for functionality. It's not something liberals can fix.

Arguments

Some persons say there is an economic principle stating that "too many dollars chasing too few goods" is a cause of inflation. There is no such thing as too few goods in the western, affluent countries beyond aberrations which disrupt processes. Disruption of processes is not an economic principle.

There are too few goods due to supply disruptions in part stemming from the pandemic. One of the consequences is price gouging, which is ballooning profits for corporations. To then raise interest rates does nothing to produce more goods, while it puts more dollars in the hands of the rip-off artists at the expense of the consumers.

The disruption of supply chains is not an economic principle. Economists cannot improve the situation. Trying to manipulate the money supply on top of supply disruptions can only increase inflation by messing up the process further.

Inflation is the cumulative result of all product prices which can't be represented by the quirks and aberrations. Large-scale disruptions are occurring and creating real inflation, but the problem of supply disruptions is not an economic problem that economists can fix. It's a hardware problem, employment problem, disease problem and political problem.

Quotes

President Biden. May 13, 2022:

“You want to bring down inflation? Let’s make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share,”

Jeff Bezos. May 14, 2022:

"The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead," Bezos responded. "Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection."

President Biden. May 14, 2022:

"Under my predecessor, the deficit increased every single year. This year, we're on track to cut the deficit by $1.5 trillion – the biggest one-year decline ever. It matters to families, because reducing the deficit is one of the main ways we can ease inflationary pressures."

Jeff Bezos. May 15, 2022:

"In fact, the administration tried hard to inject even more stimulus into an already over-heated, inflationary economy and only Manchin saved them from themselves. Inflation is a regressive tax that most hurts the least affluent. Misdirection doesn’t help the country."

Senator Joe Manchin. Last Month:

“Reconciliation to me is about getting inflation under control, paying down this debt, getting a handle on what’s going on,” said Manchin, who killed the Biden administration’s Build Back Better legislation earlier this year.

The Hill, News Report. May 15, 2022

The Truth Of The Matter

Biden is right in claiming taxing the wealthy is needed to lower inflation. Bezos claimed Biden was wrong with no explanation. Later Bezos mentioned "more stimulus," as the problem, which is not the same thing as taxing the wealthy and corporations, which means Bezos did not have an explanation for his tax claim.

The reason why taxing the wealthy and corporation is needed to lower inflation is because the wealthy and corporations are paying very little taxes, while they channel the resources of society to the top creating a nonfunctional economy for everyone else. Getting some of that money back into circulation is necessary to get inflation under control, because inflation is caused by disruptions and problems.

On top of that, Bezos implied that more stimulus would increase inflation by over-heating the economy. There is no such thing. The more active the economy, the lower prices get, because solving problems lowers prices, while creating problems increases prices.

There was a 1950s concept of inflation constantly cycling between an over-active and under-active economy, while inflation would increase on the ascending slope of activity and decrease on the descending slope.

Those slopes no longer exist. At the plateaus, which vary for all products, now days, the "hotter" the economy, the lower the inflation, because increased economic activity reduces problems, after the slopes disappear, which rapidly occurs in the economy now days. The slopes now days are for individual products and short-lived.

The reason why the 1950s were different is because everything was domestic. So increased economic activity created more jobs, which created more houses and everything that went into the houses. All of that activity was dramatic in stressing production over a lot of time. With production moving over-seas, the slopes disappeared. Vastly increased diversification of products also caused the slopes to disappear.