That Doesn’t Feel Like $150 Worth of Groceries

Over regulation on many parts of the supply chain from production to transport was exposed during covid, when reporters finally started investigating.

Some examples.

We learned the lack of producers of meat at the local level, and 4 major meat producers, 2 owned by china. Allowing mobile butchers and mom/pop meat processing centers helped in some states.

Trucking industry at ports in california showed a bunch of issues, union jobs at cranes, non overlapping shifts, limited warehouse space, limited cargo container space, lines to get cargo containers, long lines and lack of roads into and out of ports and depots.

The dumping of perishable goods made for wholesale that cant be turned into retail consumer goods. The lack of consumer sized containers.

Just in time delivery meaning many ingredients stopped entire production lines.

Price hikes by middle men in the meat industry actually did a price hike on beef, while paying farmers less. Many states already have lawsuits and investigations into the price gouging on beef.

Gas prices due to state gas taxes, limited oil supply, trucking insurance, driver retirement, while allowing mexican trucks on the road who pay less in operational costs. I read the average age of a truck driver is retirement age already. And truck driver union is one of the largest unions out. Then you put CARB EPA controls on trucks, and truckers have to buy NEW TRUCKS to deliver goods in california. Most people dont have 150k-200k to drop on a new truck, so they just avoid california.

State licenses, permits, inspections, pushing artificial limits on cottage foods and small/urban farmers. Or even bans on products, such as raw milk or unpasteurized ciders.

Taxes on inventory, double taxing on ingredients, triple taxing on the producer/shipper/wholesale cycle. Taxes add up, and someone has to pay.

Theres so much more, thats causing all these problems, and inflation/covid/greed/taxes/regulations/supply chain is really starting to show with insanely high prices.

> That hasn’t stopped some of these people from trying to blame corporations for inflation. Senator Elizabeth Warren has insisted that big businesses—ranging from grocery chains to private equity firms—have made inflation worse by “jacking up prices.” President Biden’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, has referred to “the greed of meat conglomerates.”

> If greedy corporations could “jack up” prices whenever they wanted to, then they would do it all the time, over and over. But they don’t. That’s because, well, consumers have choices, and when things get too expensive, they stop buying those things. Suggesting otherwise is silly.

> The inverse of this paper thin argument for “corporate greed” suggests that, until recently, corporations were not greedy, that, since the early 1980s, when inflation was really bad, corporations haven’t been all that keen on making that much money. Perhaps the senior senator from Massachusetts should spend a little more time in the private sector.

In fact, this can and does happen all the time. We have anti-trust legislation to prevent companies from working together to fix prices, but sometimes it happens anyways, and lawsuits get filed and companies get fined. If there haven't been any prominent legal cases lately it's not necessarily an indication that price fixing has gone away; it may just be that enforcement is lax, or that the companies have found ways to collude that aren't technically illegal or aren't flagrant enough to provoke enforcement, or that one company has simply bought most or all of its competitors.

Also, it's noteworthy that the healthcare industry is explicitly exempted from U.S. antitrust laws.

My key takeaways:

1. The primary reason for the reduction in our purchasing power is not the supply-chain disruptions occasioned by government responses to the COVID pandemic, let alone Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

2. It is actions taken by the federal government—including the Biden administration, the Trump administration, Congress and the Federal Reserve—that have landed us in our present inflationary mess

3. For 2 decades we have been told that middle class is well an alive, but it is just "squeezed", but at this point it is clear, that US middle class has been sold by the Congress to the highest bidder and is dying painful death

4. In 2011, the last time inflation was on the rise, the then-president of the New York Federal Reserve, William Dudley, ventured into a working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, to give a speech explaining why inflation wasn’t a big deal

5. Finding that he wasn’t making an impact, Dudley famously picked up an iPad 2 and told his audience, “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful.” “I can’t eat an iPad!” someone in the audience shouted back

6. Overhanging all this was a Federal Reserve that, from 2009 to 2014, deployed what’s called quantitative easing—the purchase of preset amounts of government bonds and other financial assets to inject money into the economy—to boost economic activity

7. Making matters worse is the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve, which measure inflation, have long relied on measurements that make it appear as if inflation is not as bad as it really is

8. As if to add insult to injury, “scarcity inflation,” which is due, in part, to disruptions to the supply chain, have compounded our inflationary woes

This article starts by pointing out what everyone knows (inflation is currently higher than everyone wants), but then jumps into an incoherent diatribe claiming the federal government is lying about inflation, which implies there's some kind of large-scale conspiracy. That's... not even wrong.

The BLS computes multiple inflation statistics, many of which include food energy, and the methodology and data used for computing the statistics are not just 100% transparent, they are also well documented. Don't trust my word for it. Here's a link to a BLS page with links to the different kinds of inflation statistics they track: https://www.bls.gov/bls/inflation.htm

Moreover, it's remarkably easy to compare two or more of these inflation statistics over time. For example, here's a long-term comparison of inflation in cities with and without food and energy: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=8dGq# -- as anyone can see, over the long-run, the two statistics are pretty close, but the one including food and energy has pointier spikes. Which is why the BLS tracks both.

If I had to make a guess, I would say the individual who wrote this is highly educated in the humanities, but either (a) is poorly educated in the language of science, i.e., mathematics, and therefore unable to understand what he's writing about, or (b) is ideologically motivated, and as we all know, ideology is antithetical to the pursuit of truth.

This article seems to be arguing against the Covid relief bills, suggesting that they are the primary cause of inflation. Maybe they are.

But the article does not consider the counterfactual: what situation would we be in without the Covid relief bills? Inflation might be lower, but also there would be more homeless, more bankruptcy, more unemployed.

When you shut down the economy for two years, there's no good option.

so crazy that houses are not considered consumables. they absolutely are! does anyone believe that by living in a house we are granted an automatically self-repairing house? if not: it's a consumable, just one that is consumed, in the general case, over more than just a few minutes. there are other factors that contribute to its "consumption" other than it falling apart, being used, and otherwise needing repair. the march of technology, for example, contributes yet another factor to its decline in relatively value, at a perhaps increasingly fast rate

"It is actions taken by the federal government—including the Biden administration, the Trump administration, Congress and the Federal Reserve—that have landed us in our present inflationary mess."

In other words, it is the fault of the American voter, right and left, for voting for leaders who haven't greatly cared about inflation because the voters haven't. Now both sides care a bit more, and both are prescribing solutions that ... just happen to equal a shopping list of their favorite policies, with or without inflation. Want to know who caused inflation? There's likely a portrait of the villain in your closest mirror.