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Comment by bonadrag | Hacker News Reader

Amazing that you were able to bring class divide that inflation fosters without mentioning the major responsible for it: the government and central banks.

In fact, inflation is, in its current form, a tax levied by the government on all citizens--rich and poor. You are correct that the rich can find ways to hedge some of the effects of inflation, but that's expected as the rich have way more disposable income.

I just want to know for how long people will close their eyes to these policies (green energy stimulus, self-inflicted supply chain bottlenecks, QE and bailouts to ultra rich and party donors via deposit bailout).

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I am a "believer"(#) in Modern Monetary Theory. So yeah I do think inflation is a choice by government - but only because they do not "believe" in the solution.

(roughly speaking the UK can print as much money as it has productive capacity, ie nurses or house builders, then pay those nurses to do something useful, then when there is too much money in nurses pockets and they go spending 4 pounds on bread, the government can tax the money back out of the economy. Either by taxing nurses, or you know million pound equity portfolios or billion dollar companies. The point is if inflation is too much money chasing too few productive capacity the government has a way to remove that money from the economy. How is the politics, but belief is the overton window)

Anyway, yes inflation bad. Solution is not to spend less but to tax more. Who you tax is a political choice. Personally Machine Gun Kelly is the brains here - rob the banks because that's where the money is. Tax the rich because that's where the money is.

(#) not sure what the right term is here. It seems so simple and obvious. But believer is close.

(might not be machine gun kelly)

Wealthy, central banks, government are all a rotating and revolving door of interests. I don't understand why you're making a distinction. Who do you think the government acts on the behalf of? The wealthy.

Don't think the UK government can do much about it, the inflation is driven by USA rising interest rates which devalues the pound

Pretending the UK did not intentionally decide to leave the EU, among other choices it has made, did not impact food prices is what it is.

France and Germany are also experiencing food inflation in double digits, surely you can't just blame Brexit as the big factor

Assuming you took a look at the search result I provided, but in case you missed it - “The OECD said last week that the U.K. is lagging substantially behind other developed economies, performing second only to Russia among the world's major economies.”; which is saying a lot given Russia basically committed economic suicide.

Source:

- https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/12/01/brexit-has-added-6percen...

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