Inflation is Up

You know what's pissing me off this week?  Every news organization -- left, right and center -- is screaming about the 6.2% inflation rate that was just published, October 2021 versus October 2020.

NOT ONCE has anyone mentioned that last year was incredibly atypical.  Once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic, economy severely depressed, tens of millions of people out of a job....  A good baseline it was not.

Inflation is almost guaranteed to occur coming back from a recession.  It's a good thing.  It means the economy is on the mend.

Wages and prices haven't risen normally for about two decades.

It's depressing looking at some of the questions on Quora. The Russian trolls (and, subsequently, lots of other people) are asking why Biden has screwed up so much. The answers very patiently say "stock market at record levels, unemployment down to pre-Trump levels, infrastructure bill passed, Afghanistan withdrawal a bit messy but much better than anyone could have expected given the illegal sabotage by Trump, so which screw-ups are you referring to? Gas prices? They are mostly the fault of Trump also, because he asked OPEC to cut production and they did. That's something that is much harder for Biden to fix, because he has no direct control over gas prices. Inflation? Well, that's what happens when the economy wakes up. It's not a problem yet. So again, what screw-ups?".

And Biden has only been in for 9 months, and he has achieved so much. Why can't the media report the good news?

It's the nature of the oppositional media to jump on the neck of whomever is president and attempt to bring them down.  It's particularly bad since Russian counterintelligence started funding Fox News and various "think tanks" that supply "news" feeds to right-wing media outlets.

A SURPRISING number of people, not just in the US but worldwide, have bought into these counter-factual narratives because they're couched as "facts only the really intelligent can know."  It's depressing, and frankly very very frightening to contemplate where this railroad train reaches the terminal.

I see only one "out" that ends up positive for truth & reconciliation. That would be for Biden's infrastructure bill to start making noticeable quantitative improvements in people's lives.  The Build Back Better Act must pass.  The John Lewis Voting Rights bill must pass.  

And Trump and his co-conspirators must start seeing jail time.  His lies must be exposed, but exposed in such a way that his minions don't see an opportunity for revenge or feel aggrieved in any way.  Tricky road, that. And getting trickier every day they delay.