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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: koan who wrote (255222)10/24/2022 8:30:27 PM
From: i-node  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 364213
 
You are conflating scarcity with inflation. They can appear related to economically ignorant observers.

Scarcity results from a fall in production; the price of fried chicken goes up because we aren’t making as many chickens. Yet, Tyson is still grinding out chickens at the same pace it was before.

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. Scarcity has to do its supply and demand for goods.



To: koan who wrote (255222)10/24/2022 11:09:43 PM
From: combjelly  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 364213
 
Yes, in fact that is the first thing you lean in econ 101--when demand exceeds supply, the price rises=lol.

Yeah. You see the phrase "inflation is the result of too much money chasing too few goods". Which is often the product of the government printing money. But not always. You remember the US inflation during the 1970s. Now inflation had been growing for some time due to Johnson's "guns and butter" policies due to the war in Vietnam. Like modern Republicans, he put the war on the national credit card. But what kicked it into high gear was the Arab Oil Embargo. And then the anchoveta fishery off the coast of Peru collapsed due to a combination of overfishing and a particularly strong and persistent el Nino. Since the anchoveta accounted for about 2/3rds of the global fisheries catches in previous year, that was a big blow. Now anchoveta were dried and ground up to make protein powder. Which was commonly used for food supplements in 3rd world countries and animal feed. And that triggered a rush for a replacement, which commonly was soybeans. And that caused a spike in the price of soybeans, which had been incorporated in more and more products as soybean oil and the nascent plant-based food industry. That caused a spike in a lot of commodities. Not to mention shortages. So people started panic buying and...

Remember when Johnny Carson made a joke about the shortages extending to toilet paper one night and triggered an actual toilet paper shortage as people started to panic buy? I guess Noodles either doesn't remember or didn't understand what was happening. I remember it and was following the cascade of shortages and inflation at the time. And I was in high school then. So the information was out there. Being the OCD autist that I am, I wanted to understand. It wasn't hard to get the information.

snopes.com