2024 ELECTION THREAD
The next presidential race will be here soon! Please see current Bovada odds. Thoughts?
Tariffs are uncontroversially inflationary and I went strongly against them, to the point of mentioning how that was a strong point in favor of democrats, except Biden got crazy recently and introduced an insane tariffs against Chinese EV (like 100%).
But yes tariffs are bad for inflation (and quality of life in general). Too bad both parties love them these days.
That reducing immigration is inflationary though is absolutely controversial even among mainstream economists.
Especially in a country where one of the main drivers of inflation is housing, and housing supply is constrained by political choice not capacity of the building sector.
It's not like there is demand for more housing, but companies can't keep up for physical constraints (including lack of workers), which would somehow make immigration help on the supply side as well. There is demand for more housing, but where desired local politics make it impossible to build enough.
This means that immigration is first and foremost inflationary, as it has a strong, direct causal link toward increasing housing demand at the margin, without contributing to supply at the margin.
There can be sectors where, depending exactly on how much immigration is reduced and/or how many people if any are deported, could face a shortage of workers and so could need to increase wages to attract workers from other sectors, and so prices to make up for it.
But keep in mind that if you want to use that hypothetical transmission channel for immigration reduction being inflationary, you then have to admit that American wages are kept lower than they would otherwise be by immigration, IE immigrants are actual stealing American jobs and materially decreasing the consuming power of american workers.
Which I don't think is a line you want to admit is true, so you can't claim the corollary either.
If more immigration doesn't decrease wages, then less immigration doesn't increase them, in aggregate in the economy simple as that.
The other 3 main determinants of inflation other than housing (which immigrants, as explained, make worse) are energy, educational costs and healthcare costs.
Immigrants obviously make educational costs worse (more demand for their children while they don't supply anything in the same size in proportion as teachers), slightly inflationary for energy (same energy available, more demand for it, and if they stayed at home they would consume less energy, so slight increase in worldwide energy demand) and not that big of an impact either way on healthcare (don't supply too much, but don't cost too much either for now as they are young).
So tell me again why exactly reducing immigration would be inflationary on net?
While deregulating oil and gas extraction (which Trump wants to do) is obviously, linearly deflationary, as is the push for charter schools (cost less per pupil than public schools).
Biden didn't go too crazy on his green policies (against his campaign promises) for oil and gas extraction, but it was the fossil fuel extractiom private sector that improved American energy independence, despite the hatred toward it from many democrats (not too much from Biden himself I agree), certainly not thanks to democrats who in many cases tried their best, explicitly, bragging about it, at the state level especially to fight against "big oil".
Denying that is quite surreal.
As for corporate greed and inflation in general I ask you as I asked others: why now and not every time? why do you think they haven't raised priced the same, but before, if they could? Corporations are motivated by "greed", ofc, but they all are, all the times, that never changed, so something entirely different has to be the cause for something that happened in 21-24 but not that much in 09-19.
Corporations were greedy even before, even with inflation at 1-2%
capitalism also gave us medicines
that image makes no sense.
let us go back to the horse and buggy age with pensions, health care and splendid isolation.
‘Oversees’
Ffs if you’re gonna shoot your shot making that ‘meme’ plz proofread
If people are going to complain about Harris calling out corporations for alleged price gouging as populist, shouldn’t you also have something to say about Trump saying he will “stop inflation” as if shutting down immigration and increasing tariffs will do that? After all both of these things are known to be inflationary by mainstream economists, but they sound good to the general populace.
As one of those who criticized the price gouging platform plank, let me be clear that I believe Trump to be nothing more than a populist narcissist who is out for himself, and is hopefully leading the cult to be solidly trounced at the polls. The Republicans should be kept far away from the levers of power until they can shake themselves free of Trump and his sycophants like MTG, Gaetz, and many others, as well as the ghouls behind Project 2025.
Tariffs are uncontroversially inflationary and I went strongly against them, to the point of mentioning how that was a strong point in favor of democrats, except Biden got crazy recently and introduced an insane tariffs against Chinese EV (like 100%).
But yes tariffs are bad for inflation (and quality of life in general). Too bad both parties love them these days.
I'd say I agree that in the long run we shouldn't have any tariffs whatsoever as they are almost all bad. I think there may have been some national security interest in putting tariffs on specifically China. But yes, I hope that this is just a blip on the radar and Dems continue to be anti-tariffs as they are horrible.
That reducing immigration is inflationary though is absolutely controversial even among mainstream economists.
Especially in a country where one of the main drivers of inflation is housing, and housing supply is constrained by political choice not capacity of the building sector.
It's not like there is demand for more housing, but companies can't keep up for physical constraints (including lack of workers), which would somehow make immigration help on the supply side as well. There is demand for more housing, but where desired local politics make it impossible to build enough.
This means that immigration is first and foremost inflationary, as it has a strong, direct causal link toward increasing housing demand at the margin, without contributing to supply at the margin.
There can be sectors where, depending exactly on how much immigration is reduced and/or how many people if any are deported, could face a shortage of workers and so could need to increase wages to attract workers from other sectors, and so prices to make up for it.
But keep in mind that if you want to use that hypothetical transmission channel for immigration reduction being inflationary, you then have to admit that American wages are kept lower than they would otherwise be by immigration, IE immigrants are actual stealing American jobs and materially decreasing the consuming power of american workers.
Which I don't think is a line you want to admit is true, so you can't claim the corollary either.
If more immigration doesn't decrease wages, then less immigration doesn't increase them, in aggregate in the economy simple as that.
The other 3 main determinants of inflation other than housing (which immigrants, as explained, make worse) are energy, educational costs and healthcare costs.
Immigrants obviously make educational costs worse (more demand for their children while they don't supply anything in the same size in proportion as teachers), slightly inflationary for energy (same energy available, more demand for it, and if they stayed at home they would consume less energy, so slight increase in worldwide energy demand) and not that big of an impact either way on healthcare (don't supply too much, but don't cost too much either for now as they are young).
So tell me again why exactly reducing immigration would be inflationary on net?
When I said stop immigration I also meant the massive deportation plan that Trump is currently pushing for. When people talk about mass migration and mass deportation, they talk about it as if migrants are completely ruining our country, even if they are just talking about illegal immigration. The numbers simply don't support that.
I want to push back on your first point though. Blaming immigrants for the rising cost of housing is absolutely absurd. To me, it's plain that the huge cost of housing increases are because of intentional policy decision on the part of local leaders. That I will readily admit is a bipartisan failure where conventional wisdom seems to be that we have enough housing, but the landlords are too greedy or there are abandoned buildings that should be taken from air bnb or some large corporation, which I think is absolutely dumb. On the flip side you have conservative voters that don't want to decrease the price of their house so they demand no new developments, no multi-family zoning, no commercial zoning, not even new single family zoning. We certainly have the land to accommodate immigrants, we're just looking at an extreme lack of desire to actually build new homes. Even if we deported every single illegal immigrant, I highly doubt this will make a dent on housing prices.
Aside from that, I would love to see where the controversy is with regards to immigrants being net positive for inflation. I tried finding the economists you're citing as saying that immigration is inflationary and I wasn't able to find anything, mostly just people talking about how immigration on the whole increases wages and lowers prices. Maybe I could see what you're saying if there was some massive amount of unemployment in the United States, but if that was the case then immigration would naturally just go down because people wouldn't want to come here. They mostly aren't coming here because they love the flag.
Anyway here are some sources talking about the positives of immigration on inflation.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-....
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu...
https://www.fwd.us/wp-content/uploads/20...
While deregulating oil and gas extraction (which Trump wants to do) is obviously, linearly deflationary, as is the push for charter schools (cost less per pupil than public schools).
Biden didn't go too crazy on his green policies (against his campaign promises) for oil and gas extraction, but it was the fossil fuel extractiom private sector that improved American energy independence, despite the hatred toward it from many democrats (not too much from Biden himself I agree), certainly not thanks to democrats who in many cases tried their best, explicitly, bragging about it, at the state level especially to fight against "big oil".
Denying that is quite surreal.
I never denied that. Said everything he says about energy prices are dumb and populist. For instance, he promised to cut gas prices by at least half. He promises to make the US the highest producer of oil, implying that we aren't already the highest producer of oil and saying that the US somehow implemented the GND.
1. Unleash American Energy
Under President Trump, the U.S. became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World — and we will soon be again by lifting restrictions on American Energy Production and terminating the Socialist Green New Deal. Republicans will unleash Energy Production from all sources, including nuclear, to immediately slash Inflation and power American homes, cars, and factories with reliable, abundant, and affordable Energy.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/document...
Like come on man, this is obviously just supposed to be red meat for his base and completely meaningless word salad.
He also says that he will cut gas prices in half. How can anyone make this prediction and not explain how they are going to do it? Please listen to this entire word salad of idiocy and tell me that his populist brainrot is worse than Kamala's. I am totally in agreement that there is populist brainrot in this country, but the major parts of it come from the Republican party.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Vg-kAP...
As for corporate greed and inflation in general I ask you as I asked others: why now and not every time? why do you think they haven't raised priced the same, but before, if they could? Corporations are motivated by "greed", ofc, but they all are, all the times, that never changed, so something entirely different has to be the cause for something that happened in 21-24 but not that much in 09-19.
Corporations were greedy even before, even with inflation at 1-2%
Well you're asking mechanistic questions, all I'm saying is that there is controversy there.
https://groundworkcollaborative.org/news...
The mechanism proposed is that corporations are taking advantage of an emergency where supply chains really were disrupted and using that emergency to justify raising prices far beyond the impacts of those effected supply chains. Another factor being proposed is that there are massive conglomerates that really do have the economy of scale to always outpip smaller firms anyway, and they are using their large market shares to collude to distort prices.
My personal view on it is that I don't think there is much evidence that this is truly taking place. But then, I don't think there's much evidence that "preventing outsourcing" and "bringing back the auto industry" is something that is more important than having free markets where we can have cheap and readily available goods. Unfortunately what has happened is that the two parties are beholden at least somewhat to the extremes. I see some good indications from Harris that she is trying to avoid those extremes, like not going all in on identity politics. However for Trump, he will just say whatever he thinks it will take to win again so that he can avoid consequences for what he did on Jan 6 and the various civil and criminal violations he made both in and out of office.
For me, this election is not a referendum on economic policy, it's quite simply whether or not you want to elect a demagogue who fundamentally doesn't care who wins any election because he will always declare his side the winner.
whoever theo von is gets it, idk why some of yall don't
hate to break it to some of you, but none of these capitalist politicians are gonna "fix" capitalism
@72off maybe you should see the proposals that Trump has made re: communists/leftists. Making sure no one immigrates here that is “marxist”. Kicking out “leftists” from the military. Preventing so-called “communist” education. Oh yeah and also deporting so-called Hamas sympathizers, which I imagine to Trump is just anyone who doesn’t fellate every one of Israel’s war policies. Trump’s 2024 campaign is going to be a new red scare.
Good luck organizing the revolution with that backdrop!
@72off maybe you should see the proposals that Trump has made re: communists/leftists. Making sure no one immigrates here that is “marxist”. Kicking out “leftists” from the military. Preventing so-called “communist” education. Oh yeah and also deporting so-called Hamas sympathizers, which I imagine to Trump is just anyone who doesn’t fellate every one of Israel’s war policies. Trump’s 2024 campaign is going to be a new red scare.
what do you want me to do about it?
Good luck organizing the revolution with that backdrop!
ok, because i wasn't, so
all typos and undereducation can be traced back to capitalism
WaPo coming hard
wow jeff bezos' newspaper doesn't like price controls? thats wild man
so the dems have semi-embraced crypto at least with the most pro crypto thing i've seen actual politicians that pass laws say. not included the whacko's like rfk jr that are just saying the USgovernment will hold the bag.
i'm sure housenuts will now join the democratic big tent, ofcourse if he was serious about crypto as an idea and not just trying to get the government to buy into the ponzi scheme.
Since you're interested
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/cry...
Her post includes references to some of the tweets I shared earlier.
I would have to look at the proposal itself, but it seems more like she is proposing some kind of qualitative assessment of "price gouging" rather than specific price controls. Also, it's a little silly to say that "price controls" are communist when they have been used in may social democracies as well which are capitalist countries.
The real problem I see with this proposal is that it would require an act of congress, and there's no way in hell she would get any Republican support for such an idea. Therefore seems DOA.
Price control was used in the US in the past, so it is surely more MAGA than it is communist.
Jokes aside, the article is disingenuous and its assumptions shaky. It seems more aimed at supporting a headline that scares US voters than having a connection to reality.
Stopping price gouging is not the same as price control. Anti-monopoly laws and laws against cartels are both approaches meant to block (among other things) the ability to set prices arbitrarily high, and neither relies on the government deciding prices. In the US, these laws would be the various anti-trust acts.
Lack of transparency and oversight that enable these laws to function and lack of enforcement that enable government to pursue those who violate them are both legitimate political issues.
But it is of course easier to scream "ZOMG, COMMUNISTS!", and it of course gets you more readers and more voters.
This by tame shows why the sherman act was the original sin, the opening of the door to hell. Since that, bad faithed leftists could always point to that as proof that completly unrelated federal government violence was justified by precedent against private entities "because we do it with monopolies".
Keep talking about price gouging without defining it, and most of all keep using the antitrust analogy when the proposed action is over a hyper-fragmented market sector, "groceries".
When did MAGA start calling everyone it dislikes communists?
Here are some reasons to vote against MAGA this year.
They plan to:
- eliminate public education
- eliminate social security
- privatize postal service
Also, there's the stuff with: immigrants, merger of (Evangelical) Church and state, pardoning terrorists, Schedule F / desire to fire all federal workers who aren't loyal, the economic crushing tax cuts and deficit spending, lies, incompetence, looting, etc ...
With Dems we get the traditional American flavor of looting, not forcing your enemies into cages and rewriting laws so you can win. That's GOP now in essence.
