Hopefully for right-leaning homos

[PozBearWI]

Prices.  Yes, cost of goods is an issue.  Ditto housing.  However attributing the CAUSE to the parties is foolish.  We know why.  We had a big ole global pandemic four years ago.  Global supply chains were horribly disrupted and thus, availability of goods went down; and as a result prices went up.  Compounding this, PAY went UP.  Certainly not the US federal minimum wage, but Mickey D locally went from about $9 to $15 during Covid.  Corresponding employment costs went up as well so businesses needed to raise their prices to pay their staff.  

Does tax policy influence prices?  Yes.  And keep in mind WE pay those tariffs that Agent Orange promotes.  

The cost of goods seems to have settled out somewhat, but of course now those $15 and $16 an hour jobs don't pay for as much stuff.  

 

Fiscally I am somewhat conservative.  In my local government, of which I am a part, we are grappling with our 2025 budget.  We are putting off some desirable things because we are spending more now on our improved EMS and Fire protection, which had become less responsive over time.  We have some growth underway that will bring in more cash to our budget in future years, but not in 2025.  

[nanana]

6 hours ago, PozBearWI said:

We had a big ole global pandemic four years ago.  Global supply chains were horribly disrupted and thus, availability of goods went down; and as a result prices went up. 

What percentage of the supply chain disruption was the actual health issue and how much was the government reaction? How much of wage rises were about having to compete against the government which was paying people not to work?

[PozBearWI]

@nanana  "the government reaction"?   It was several governments around the globe.  

Up until Covid and in prior administrations we had protocols in place which helped stop spread early on (while it was still relatively simple to do).  I'll cite what we did with Ebola outbreaks.  45 jettisoned all those protocols so that we were back to stumbling our way through it.  

[SomewhereonNeptune]

11 hours ago, PozBearWI said:

Prices.  Yes, cost of goods is an issue.  Ditto housing.  However attributing the CAUSE to the parties is foolish.  We know why.  We had a big ole global pandemic four years ago.  Global supply chains were horribly disrupted and thus, availability of goods went down; and as a result prices went up.  Compounding this, PAY went UP.  Certainly not the US federal minimum wage, but Mickey D locally went from about $9 to $15 during Covid.  Corresponding employment costs went up as well so businesses needed to raise their prices to pay their staff.  

Does tax policy influence prices?  Yes.  And keep in mind WE pay those tariffs that Agent Orange promotes.  

The cost of goods seems to have settled out somewhat, but of course now those $15 and $16 an hour jobs don't pay for as much stuff.  

I struggle with some of this because there are multiple causes, some perhaps political, others economic, still others supply-chain. Let's face it, we have a codependency issue with China now because of the amount of manufacturing that has been transferred into a single country. That needs to change to where that supply-chain needs to include other countries in both hemispheres to be manageable when a supply-chain issue occurs with one source.

I question the need for government continuing to offer COVID supports into 2021 and beyond, making many people accustomed to not re-entering the labor market and letting jobs go unfilled. So the US goes into debt and spends, resulting in more money entering the economy, which in turn deflates the dollar's value and leads to inflation further down. So when all of that took root a year or so later, the Federal Reserve responded by raising interest rates to counter inflationary pressures, which caused mortgage rates to double or more and effectively killed real estate demand because housing prices had spiked before then. You can see the cycle. 

Now years later we still have COVID, we're finding out that there are issues with the MRNA versions of vaccines and that the "2 weeks to halt the spread" wasn't necessarily that answer. Plus we were fed a series of what ended up being misleading information about just what these vaccines would do. 'They'll prevent COVID...errr...well they'll prevent the recurrence after you've gotten it once....umm....well, actually it won't be as bad the next time around', etc. I got COVID post-vaccine, it was still pretty nasty but not more so for me than the average flu (your mileage may vary). But hindsight is always 20/20.

I'm not in favor of tariffs. I had a business venture with someone that frankly went bust because trying to get microprocessors due to China closures became nearly impossible. Adding more tariffs? Not a great answer and it won't help open markets.

 

[SomewhereonNeptune]

4 minutes ago, PozBearWI said:

@nanana  "the government reaction"?   It was several governments around the globe.  

Up until Covid and in prior administrations we had protocols in place which helped stop spread early on (while it was still relatively simple to do).  I'll cite what we did with Ebola outbreaks.  45 jettisoned all those protocols so that we were back to stumbling our way through it.  

Wasn't one of those protocols to have included screening and refusing entry from countries that were the origin? I think that was suggested and was roundly panned as being 'racist'. Anyone who's ever flown through Hong Kong understands how the Chinese government screens and pulls out anyone who exhibits an above-normal temperature through temporal and infra-red scanning, and no one's called that as racist versus being the prudent thing to do. 

If there is another protocol you had in mind, please enlighten us as I for one may not know.

[PozBearWI]

Yes it was.  And yet 45 decided that citizens were exempt from that.  So even though they were an "American" in Wutan, they were welcome to come home rather than stay in place until more was known.

[SomewhereonNeptune]

1 hour ago, PozBearWI said:

Yes it was.  And yet 45 decided that citizens were exempt from that.  So even though they were an "American" in Wutan, they were welcome to come home rather than stay in place until more was known.

It was Wuhan, think the other is like a "clan". 🤣 I think there's more to the story than just that. If I recall, he suggested shutting down the borders and transit and was panned for that approach and branded a racist without the benefit of explaining the protocols. 

But let's go back. China had evidence of this long before the first reported cases were in the US and also was not at all forthcoming to share their details in order to be a good global citizen. I imagine if they did so we'd have had much more information about how the virus developed, the etymology, transmission, and we could have been properly ahead of things before they'd gotten out of hand. But again, despite saying that this wasn't a political issue, people are quick to suggest "45 bad, 46 good" when there's a deeper story.

We put the entire globe into lockdown but did that truly resolve anything? Did we "stop the spread"? We make decisions based on the knowledge on hand, and balancing that with the needs of the population. I'm sure we'll disagree on this point, or how the media handled narratives (e.g. if you believed the media, you'd think bodies in Florida were piling up when in fact they weren't and the truth was that we have a more elderly and susceptible population), but respectfully I'm inclined to suggest there was a balancing act and we were left to figure things out based on incomplete information. 

[PozBearWI]

Of course we did NOT stop it.  WHY?  Because globally we dilly dallied around, not paying attention to virology, but instead politics.  

[nanana]

Do folks think the government has the right to lock down and jail people just because some myopic scientist says - thanks to big pharma data - that it’s “necessary”? What part of the Constitution or Bill of Rights upholds this?

[SomewhereonNeptune]

17 hours ago, nanana said:

Do folks think the government has the right to lock down and jail people just because some myopic scientist says - thanks to big pharma data - that it’s “necessary”? What part of the Constitution or Bill of Rights upholds this?

I don't want to sound like a Fauci conspiracy theory though there's potentially some valid linkage between NIH/Fauci and Gain of Function work. Simply, I don't support the curtailment of freedoms and think that we've gone a few steps too far with Big Pharma due to lobbying and massive campaign contributions. No big surprise to that. But locking down and jailing people is rather dystopian and represents the China approach where the CCP dictates everything you can do. If the US and other countries took such a heavy-handed approach, where could we then say we have a moral superiority over that?