The media has done a horrible job of talking about inflation and contextualizing it.
First and foremost, it’s a problem of persistently low and stagnant wages. If wages had gone up by, let’s say, 8%, then a 6.5% increase in the cost of living is not a problem.
It’s a sad state of affairs that our body politic cannot imagine every worker getting prompt wage increases that at least match inflation. It’s just baked in apparently. The only option for a majority of workers is to have the Fed raise rates, have other workers lose their jobs and hope that we either have deflation that’s driven by a lack of consumer demand because now most workers are either unemployed or in fear of being unemployed.
There’s also the media’s near total indifference towards tuition, student loans, rent, health insurance premiums, out of pocket costs for people with health insurance, and the fact that a decent retirement requires more and more of a person’s lifetime earnings. All of these policy failures make a select few very rich and those select few often times fund the media. But let’s all freak out when a family of 11 pays more for milk every month. It costs $96 additional dollars a month to feed those enormous kids, we can’t just use the child tax credit to pay for that. We can’t just use fiscal policy to help people, no, we have to raise rates and forego economic stimulus and human infrastructure all to get 10-15 million of the most marginalized people to lose their jobs and maybe they’ll take lower paying jobs in disease ridden dairies and slaughter houses and then maybe, just maybe the companies that supply milk and meat will reduce their prices and middle class households can buy their 48 gallons of milk per month again.
Lastly, we know the media don’t care about hardships caused by inflation because in every other context, their response to people struggling to pay for things is that those people need to budget better or work an additional job. Every story about inflation is just an invitation for austerity and hard money and that pain will disproportionately fall on the most vulnerable.
To be clear, inflation causes problem and it causes problems to those most at the margins and the “solution” that you’ll see from the majority of our politicians and the media will be to raise rates and harm those very same people at the margin.
(avi looked funny)
