Current administration created gazillions of dollars out of thin air, far more than previous ones. They deserve the credit.
However, there's some irony in the fact that we got money, printed out of nowhere, signed by the previous president, and yet there are people that act like inflation is solely a "current administration" problem.
Ah yes, but he only did that because Trump started it. /s
But it hasn't. We have gotten the worst of both worlds: huge economic damage and lots of dead Americans. More Americans have died of COVID since the current administration took office than before that. And since governments around the world have demonstrated that they cannot stop COVID, the least they could have done was refrain from inflicting the economic damage as well.
But we don't know that that is true, and it doesn't seem likely based on the fact that the data shows no perceptible changed based on the money being spent; the variations in the data are entirely due to seasonality and different variants appearing.
And there absolutely was a substantial dip in deaths after the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was passed in March of 2021. Last summer was the closest to "back to normal" we've gotten since this pandemic started.
I think this is a very nice theory which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be borne out in the data. See below.
> there absolutely was a substantial dip in deaths after the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was passed in March of 2021.
First, the money didn't magically appear in everyone's pocket the day the act was passed, so if you were going to look for any effects, it wouldn't be right after the act was passed. You would have to allow some time for the effects to propagate. How much time? Of course nobody has any answer to that; anyone who claims to is just waving their hands and pushing an ideological position.
Second, as I've already said, all the variation we see in the data can be explained by seasonality and the times at which various new variants appeared. So Occam's Razor says there was no significant effect due to all the additional money being printed.
Just sounds like you're making up whatever excuses you can to avoid giving credit where credit is due.
Occam's Razor here says that the dump of money helped people, as that is by far the simplest explanation. It's your convoluted mishmash of viewpoints that is objectively more complex.
Plus, you attacked the person instead of their ideas: "your convoluted mishmash of viewpoints".
No, I didn't "go from" one of those criticisms to the other. I am making both of them. I am saying both of the following:
(1) The variation in the data can be explained by things we already know happen: seasonality and new variants emerging. So there's no need to hypothesize an additional effect just because you would like to claim that printing trillions of dollars of new money was a good idea.
(2) The model you are using to make your claimed prediction can't make any such prediction anyway, because it can't predict how long it should take for the effects of printing trillions of dollars of new money to show up in the data on COVID deaths. So even if we did see something in the data that could not be explained by seasonality and new variants emerging, we would have no reason to believe that it was due to printing trillions of dollars of new money.
It's perfectly possible for both of those things to be true.
> the effects we do see in the data (contradicting your first point)
My first point makes no such claim. Indeed, it says the opposite: it says there is variation in the data.
> Occam's Razor here says that the dump of money helped people, as that is by far the simplest explanation.
No, it isn't. The simplest explanation is the one that does not hypothesize any new effects over and above the ones we already know happen, like seasonality and new variants emerging. Both of these have been visible in the data throughout this pandemic. Indeed, both of these effects are well known and expected for any viral infection that causes respiratory illness. Or have you never heard the term "flu season" or been aware that flu vaccines have to change every year because of new variants?
You cannot argue both, and yet you continue to try. Nothing else in your comment follows, since this does not follow.
Sure I can. The inconsistency you think you see is in the straw man version of my argument that you have concocted in your head, not in my actual argument.
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/05/savings-are-now-more...
However, the graph certainly does show another inflection point after the start of the Biden administration, that has nothing to do with the previous change.
The Fed certainly expected at least some inflation from that much spending, although they seem to have missed the size of the increase.
>President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is contributing to elevated inflation but it isn't expected to overheat the economy, a new research paper from the San Francisco Federal Reserve concludes.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/19/economy/inflation-biden-stimu...
After blaming Trump for a global pandemic, we probably don't get to use that excuse to shield Biden from blame when bad things happen under his watch.
For good or ill, "the buck stops here" is a longstanding American tradition.
You mean the previous admin? Biden did not do much in response to covid.