Just a thought, but maybe inflation wasn’t driving the cost of goods. Maybe it was something else, like corporate greed, maybe…
Also, saying the median person’s purchasing power is back to 2019 levels isn’t a good thing.
Inflation isn’t a separate thing from corporate greed, it’s a measure of how much prices went up. The corporate greed is part of the inflation.
The reason we feel poorer is because the inflation outpaced wage rises for a number of years, ie. we’re literally poorer, relatively speaking.
Also, “inflation is down” just means that it has slowed back to a more normal pace; prices aren’t gonna go down. Inflation is permanent (unless we have deflation but rich people will never allow that)
- Greed is checked by competition
- Competition got severely reduced during the pandemic
- The inflation is a result of the newly-unchecked greed, not merely a result of greed (which hasn’t changed)
While the spirit of your post is true, I think inflation is a lot of different things. Generally when people talk about inflation they are talking about the valuation of currency and buying power on a global scale… That doesn’t include corporation inflation, nor does it include consumer prices.
This is one of those economic terms that gets thrown around a lot but everyone can be correct. Colloquially, while talking about “inflation”, most people are talking about their own personal expenses, particularly among necessary goods, where it definitely applies, with CPI.
I’d just be careful speaking in absolutes here… Baseline economic inflation that is talked about in the news is different from conversational “inflation”, but people often conflate the two.
Kind of one of those “all squares are rhombuses” things… Not all inflation is talking about prices that would be affected by corporate profits.
When they say “inflation is cooling” it means inflation is still happening but not as fast. It doesn’t mean deflation is happening. Prices won’t come down until deflation.
Even the articles that try to explain it an understanding, but “deflation is bad for the economy” way still feel out of touch. “It’s okay for you to struggle to buy food and pay rent because the opposite would be bad for the economy.”
Edit: The promise of wages maybe rising someday to match higher costs haven’t happened for me or anyone I know yet. The federal minimum wage hasn’t increased to match inflation either.
Inflation clearly was not the primary cause behind the multi-industry price gouging that has driven prices for just about everything sky high. It’s late stage capitalism, the corporations are too big and too powerful. Who will stop them? They are mask off at this point.
Having said that, there are things being done, an example being Biden’s threats to take the patents away from pharmaceutical companies that take taxpayer money and do this shit to Medicaid patients. He’s also mentioned in some of his recent speeches that prices are disproportionately too high, but I have yet to see anything that deters these out of control capitalists
Lower inflation mostly means the prices don’t increase as much as they were.
