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Comment by cmdli | Hacker News Reader

Democrats don’t control the price of groceries, and even what they can somewhat control (inflation) improved massively. Trump will also not bring down the price of groceries, so either voters don’t care about that or they (completely incorrectly) blame Democrats for it. Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.

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>>Either way, I don’t see this as the Democrats fault.

Somehow I think that's problem. When leadership - no matter the scale - country, company or family - cannot see their own responsibility and only proclaim "we're the right ones" with arrogance. That is when you get unfavourable outcome. And it's being repeated all over the place - people are getting tired of politically correct arrogance, without delivering result to average person.

I'll just point out that when you say "inflation improved massively," you are talking about the second derivative of price. You are saying that there was a positive change in inflation, meaning that the rate of change of the rate of change of price is favorable. Who cares? This is not a meaningful statistic. People can't afford groceries!

Well, we don’t want prices to go down. That would be deflation, which is worse than inflation.

So how come the massive deflation in goods over the last fifty years didn't destroy the world economy?

Some goods might have deflated, but overall there was mild inflation.

Yes, whatever portion made their decision based on cost of groceries do believe the president influences prices. It’s the same as the old line about “gas prices are too damn high”. Most people aren’t very involved in politics and they don’t understand things like this, or that economic cycles are so long that half the time it’s the result of the previous party’s actions what is happening now.

Harris played to and reinforced this economic illiteracy by proposing federal price controls for groceries.

But I mean what else could she do? You tell the electorate the truth and they don't understand it or don't listen, you lie and say "fine we will fix it with price controls" and they freak out all the same. Only one side of the political apparatus can like with impunity, apparently.

In theory Trump could bring down the price of groceries by threatening to put the Kroger CEO in prison, etc.

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