This man won a Nobel Prize in economics. Inflation doesn’t hurt the poor, says Paul Krugman. I’m not kidding. The man went on a Twitter thread where he tried to cast an aura of mystery regarding the spike in inflation. Inflation has reached its worst marks in 30 years—and the Biden administration seems incapable of dealing with it. By that, I mean they don’t care. It wouldn’t shock me if they think this crisis is fake. No, they do, and they’re ignoring it at their peril. But first, let’s hear what Krugman said about this crisis where he said, “'Inflation especially hurts the poor’ has truthiness — it sounds like it should be true. But I don't see either evidence or a mechanism.”
Aside from priorities, is this even true? Is there any good reason to believe that inflation hits low-income households especially hard? 1/ https://t.co/72hxWaL5zW
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 11, 2021
Inflation redistributes from creditors to debtors — not exactly a burden on the bottom half of the income distribution 2/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 11, 2021
The great disinflation after the 1970s was associated with soaring, not falling, inequality — mostly not causal, but hardly supportive of the claim 3/ pic.twitter.com/3uPXXJoHNp
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 11, 2021
"Inflation especially hurts the poor" has truthiness — it sounds like it should be true. But I don't see either evidence or a mechanism 4/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 11, 2021
When the price of common goods goes up, you don’t think that hurts the poor, Paul. What is this? You don’t need to be a Nobel laureate to know that it does. That’s a hot take—almost as bad as saying taxation doesn’t impact pricing. The bloc of voters who are noticing the spike are women. I’ll keep saying it—American women are the ones who balance the home budgets. They see how things are going off the rails. And we’re not even talking about the spike in natural gas prices that will sink home budgets. Also, can we start with the simple fact that inflation, for the most part, is bad. It’s bad. It’s going up. And we have President ‘Brain be gone’ who has zero clue what’s going on because he’s still looking for the non-existent keys that he left in the fridge.
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