Okay, so what you're mad about is inflation. I get that. That's a reasonable thing to be mad at.
And what drives inflation? In the 50s, in the post war era, it was driven by bottlenecks in manufacturing. Specifically the factories needed to be tooled back to producing consumer goods instead of military goods. This resulted in low stocks across the nation, which drove prices up.
Scarcity in goods means you could charge more.
In the 70s, it was kind of the opposite. A lot of people had more money, so companies found that they could charge more even though there wasn't a shortage of supply.
But other than those 2 eras, inflation has been pretty low because it's driven by 3 things: costs of labor, costs of materials, and profit margin desired. Roughly each one making up about 33% of the price of goods.
When the pandemic started, and the supply went down, economist predicted a surge in inflation because lower availability of goods. And that happened.
They also predicted it would level out when supply lines were able to open back up.
Except that it didn't. It kept going up.
So, economist Andrew Glover in Kansas City decided to start doing some science and investigation into it. What he found was that the driver of inflation as too few goods being chased by money (post war inflation ) nor was it too much money in circulation (the 70s inflation) it was corporations continuously raising their prices.
This was despite their labor and materials costs remaining the same.
They drove their profit margin from 33% to 61%.
It was corporate greed.
You can read the study here: https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-review/how-much-have-record-corporate-profits-contributed-to-recent-inflation/
It's great you're mad about inflation. You should be.
Be mad at the right people.
