• @walter_wiggles
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    426 months ago

    Just a thought, but maybe inflation wasn’t driving the cost of goods. Maybe it was something else, like corporate greed, maybe…

    Also, saying the median person’s purchasing power is back to 2019 levels isn’t a good thing.

    • @[email protected]
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      136 months ago

      Inflation isn’t a separate thing from corporate greed, it’s a measure of how much prices went up. The corporate greed is part of the inflation.

      The reason we feel poorer is because the inflation outpaced wage rises for a number of years, ie. we’re literally poorer, relatively speaking.

      • @[email protected]
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        56 months ago

        Also, “inflation is down” just means that it has slowed back to a more normal pace; prices aren’t gonna go down. Inflation is permanent (unless we have deflation but rich people will never allow that)

      • @[email protected]
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        46 months ago
        • Greed is checked by competition
        • Competition got severely reduced during the pandemic
        • The inflation is a result of the newly-unchecked greed, not merely a result of greed (which hasn’t changed)
      • @[email protected]
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        16 months ago

        While the spirit of your post is true, I think inflation is a lot of different things. Generally when people talk about inflation they are talking about the valuation of currency and buying power on a global scale… That doesn’t include corporation inflation, nor does it include consumer prices.

        This is one of those economic terms that gets thrown around a lot but everyone can be correct. Colloquially, while talking about “inflation”, most people are talking about their own personal expenses, particularly among necessary goods, where it definitely applies, with CPI.

        I’d just be careful speaking in absolutes here… Baseline economic inflation that is talked about in the news is different from conversational “inflation”, but people often conflate the two.

        Kind of one of those “all squares are rhombuses” things… Not all inflation is talking about prices that would be affected by corporate profits.