Deficit destroying the middle class

Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden are all guilty of deficit spending. It's bipartisan. The Republicans blame the Democrats. The Democrats say it's not a problem. They are both lying. The Uniparty is spending as much money as possible. The wealth of the middle class has been shrinking for years. Now it is accelerating exponentially. Proof: Every trip to the supermarket gets a little more painful.

It's not just the middle class. It's everyone not on government assistance.

The political elite are creating modern feudalism. Investment groups are buying up houses making them unaffordable. Soon we will own nothing and be their subjects.

People on government assistance get pushed up past inflation. They are barely affected.

The US of course. Please pay attention.

CtrlFreq, you are saying that every business in the US is guilty of price collusion. Why was there no price collusion under Trump?

Profiteering, not price collusion - corporate profits from 1980-2020 accounted for around 10% of price increases, whereas they account for more than 50% since 2020.

As for why it didn't occur under Trump, it's because he created the conditions that allowed it to happen but was run out of office due to his bungling of the pandemic. He cut corporate tax rates making it cheaper to remove capital from the system than keeping it in, started a bunch of stupid trade wars that increased taxes on American consumers in the form of tariffs on the raw materials and finished goods they were purchasing, and then bungled the pandemic response and ground our supply chains to a stop.

Since we've emerged from the Trump economic crisis, the market and corporate profits have been at all time highs, but since the monetary supply has been in decline for more than a year, those profits have only been sustained through wage cuts and price increases.

How can there be profiteering without price collusion? That is not logical. CtrlFreq, you don't seem to know much about markets.

Did you not see the graph? In the last 3 years, the US government has spent far more money than it has ever spent in history. Interest on the debt just surpassed military spending. This is a fact. It's not about how you feel.

Because you don't need to collude on raising prices when supply chains implode and the marketplace is flooded with new dollars like the $6T printed in Trump's final year in office.

When those new dollars dry up, investors demand the same returns, and the only way to deliver them is through wage suppression and price hikes - hence why corporate profits account for 4-5 times the amount of price increases during the last 4 years than the 40 prior.

January 20, 2021 Biden was inaugurated. Is that the year Trump printed 6T?

Here's the same M2 data on the same graph so the scale of the Y-axis isn't so distorted:

No, nothing close to that has been printed since Joe took office, but going back over the numbers, you're right - Trump only printed $4T of his $6T during 2020.

I'd confused the fact that the supply expanded by $6T during his tenure in office and the fact that it expanded by $6T during the pandemic (between March of 2020 and March 2022), but those two are completely unrelated other than they both include $4T in new dollars printed during 2020.

OK. We agree. US government spending is out of control. Both Parties are at fault. Why will you not admit that deficit spending is the main cause of inflation? History and current statistics prove that it is. Corporate greed is a constant, not a variable. High energy prices are a minor cause, but printing money to cover deficit spending is the main cause.

"Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden are all guilty of deficit spending. It's bipartisan." I posted this earlier. Maybe you didn't see it. Yes, Trump spent too much money, but Biden spent way more than any President before him. Republicans are to blame also. They passed the budget. It was a Uniparty effort.

Right, right, but printing money and deficit spending are two completely different subjects, and spending isn't inherently bad - that's only if it fails to deliver the promised benefits.

Trump's deficit spending (and deficit-causing tax cuts) weren't showing signs of improving much before the pandemic, and left us catastrophically unprepared when it hit.

Biden's deficit spending on the other hand has performed as advertised - inflation has been hovering around 3% for more than a year now, the economy is booming, and critical infrastructure is being repaired after decades of neglect and sabotage.

"Sabotage?" What are you talking about?

No one in the real world believes inflation is 3%. Food & housing are way more than 3%. Energy prices are somewhat stable. My car and home insurance doubled.