- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he isn’t buying all that Democratic “joy” on display at this past week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago during a Sunday appearance with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union.
During their conversation, Tapper brought up the “disciplined” and “well-produced” DNC this week that, as the journalist put it, “conveyed patriotism and unity.” Graham didn’t see it that way.
“Well, I didn’t see what you saw,” Graham told Tapper with a laugh. “If you’re a Republican, you saw a hate fest. You saw a hate fest full of insults.”
“Americans are not joyful when they go to the gas station and fill up their car,” he continued. “They’re not joyful when they make their mortgage payment. They’re not joyful when they go to the grocery store. People are hurting, and this whole joy love fest doesn’t exist in the real world.”
To bolster his claim, Graham pointed to the gas prices, the state of the border, and inflation during Donald Trump’s presidency when “the world was not on fire.”
He’s either lying or what he said gives us a look into his shitty perspective of the world. Either way such a miserable and pathetic existence.
The problem with inflation is that it’s sticky i.e. the inflation that happened under Trump didn’t go away under Biden. Inflation has been slower (although you’ll notice it’s still elevated) but the inflation that already happened is baked in to that.
People can feel that things are more expensive than they used to be. It doesn’t matter that things are getting more expensive slower, what matters is a bunch of inflation already happened and it didn’t go away (and, in fact, just kept getting worse)
Tranditionally, inflation paired with rising income isn’t a big problem.
The real terror of inflation in the modern era is that wages remain stagnant.
Actually, real wages are up for six years running.
Not according to the Atlanta Fed.
Through May 2024, real wages are up 0.5 percent year over year. While real wage growth has turned slightly positive in recent months, the level of real wages is still below where they were at the onset of the inflation surge that we began to see in the first quarter of 2021.
It’s ever present too. If inflation were to ever stop for a sustained amount of time I guarantee it would be a far worse political issue. In the meantime things always cost more tomorrow than they will today which is why I argued what I did: relative inflation control was better than it was for almost everyone else under Biden than Trump because it is one of the only ways to fairly compare administrations as each one experiences their one unique circumstances.
Well yeah, inflation is part of economic growth under capitalism. That’s just how the system functions, no argument.
What people want is prices to come back down again, and that would require price controls (which Harris is actually talking about when she talks about stopping “price gouging” - I’m tentatively interested to see if she follows through on that)