It tends to be the well off people who dismiss inflationary pressures.
I certainly don't look at my heating bill every month.
But inflation is devastating to the working poor. Funny that it's so easily brushed aside by those who claim to advocate for them.
Consumer perception of the economy is roughly equivalent to 2009 numbers now, in a recent study. The public by and large thinks the economy is terrible, primarily due to the inflationary pressures.
Consider that unemployment affects the marginal job seeker, but inflation affects everybody. From a purely political lens, vying for higher employment at the expense of inflation, once past a reasonable threshold, seems like a losing move.
If inflation is supply-side (e.g. oil runs out, a ship gets stuck in Suez, etc) then workers lose.
If it's demand-side, then their wages should rise up together with inflation so they don't win or lose (except for whatever savings they have and whatever time it takes for wages to adjust).
Wage numbers come out with the monthly jobs report. Only one month this year did wages rise higher than inflation, IIRC.
So wages are rising, but slower than inflation, e.g. people getting poorer. And of course, many stay in the same job and don't get a raise, or get a paltry raise.
Many seniors living off of fixed income investments which are yielding lower than ever. And so on...
Workers are only better off if wage is strongly above inflation. I do see people cheering on wage gains, even though they've been persistently below inflation, which is a bit of a headscratcher.
It seems the public perception is finally starting to bubble up though, rather than the headline narratives.
Poor people often have a negative net worth. If both inflation and wages are rising, it makes their debts easier to pay off.
I'm not arguing that inflation is good for poor people, just that "Inflation = Bad" is reductionist. There are winners and losers with inflation, and the lives of most individuals are affected in nuanced ways, both positively and negatively.
These aren't prices we haven't seen before. Electronics, sure, but there's a pretty good non-general-inflationary explanation for that. This (still) ain't the 70s.
Well, I believe it is. The original argument was that it is a very large price increase of small number of not that widely consumed goods causing the numbers to look that bad.
Housing, transportation, energy and food are the majority of expenditure for most people, which is in a direct contradiction of what OP claims.
I don't think the cost of propane nearly doubling is bull whip, not out here. Therr are going to be a lot of people wearing extra layers and looking at getting wood stoves out here this winter.
It is a good point. Inflation can be argued as an effect that impacts different people differently. If you're a vegetarian, rising beef prices do not affect you. So using an inflation indicator such as produced by the Fed and other organizations is not accurate for you as a person. I do indeed see inflation and it seems much more than the 5 to 8 percent that is published by the various inflation gauges. I'm not an average person and there really isn't an average person out there and we get impacted in different ways.
Also the issue with aggregates indicators is that some expenses can be more easily adapted than others: it’s easier to buy a less powerful smartphone/TV/GPU than to heat or eat less.
Food prices does not mean much when houses go for a few hundred thousand more within a couple years, or daycare prices increase from $15k/year to $16k to $17k or health insurance deductibles go from $3k to $5k to $7k.
For a young family that is interested in buying a house, food/gas does not even register.
Same, and New York. Anecdotal evidence doesn't really amount to much though, since prices fluctuate wildly from place to place (i.e. Pittsburgh is cheaper than New York, regardless of the inflation index).
USA. I've noticed a few restaurants bumping prices up a buck, but most haven't changed yet.
By galloping inflation, I hope that means wage increases. Inflation is neither bad nor good, until it changes people's behavior. Even then, it's not strictly bad until it spirals out of control. Until then, inflation is in many ways a good thing: higher wages, higher revenues, transferring money from creditors to debtors. These are things many people want more of.
Switzerland has had very limited inflation so far, I think the annual inflation is expected to be around 1.5% for 2021. Though to be fair, Switzerland has had about 0% inflation on average since 2015, with a few years of deflation in that interval, so it's still quite a big increase.
Electric generation charge has basically doubled for me (.045 to .085). Beef prices are about 50% higher, chicken at least 10%, pork about 15%. Etc.
I also know people buying cars at or close to MSRP that would have gotten them for much less before. So the sticker prices might be the same, but actual prices paid are going up.
As papi used to say, “follow the money.” If you’re a retailer, why not raise prices and blame inflation? I’m not saying increased labor costs and higher costs for raw materials don’t play into the equation, but if I can charge $7 for a gallon of milk instead of $6.50 and pocket the extra $0.50, seems like a good deal to me!
I make the median US household income and I don’t even think about the prices of any of those things, I’m more worried about housing prices, not being a homeowner.
Past 6 months? What are you talking about? It's been the past 30 months - ever since Trump declared a trade war with China and then the pandemic hit. My grocery bills and the price of everything else have been rising noticeably ever since. The problem we're experiencing now is demand is surging and the supply chain hasn't recovered from the pandemic. High demand/low supply is a nice problem to have if you're a policymaker. That's why the policymakers aren't too worried about inflation.
I certainly don't look at my heating bill every month.
But inflation is devastating to the working poor. Funny that it's so easily brushed aside by those who claim to advocate for them.
Consumer perception of the economy is roughly equivalent to 2009 numbers now, in a recent study. The public by and large thinks the economy is terrible, primarily due to the inflationary pressures.
Consider that unemployment affects the marginal job seeker, but inflation affects everybody. From a purely political lens, vying for higher employment at the expense of inflation, once past a reasonable threshold, seems like a losing move.