True. I was referencing the stimulus checks. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to increase taxes just to give people checks.
At least that has stopped. No more talk about BBB with its huge giveaways. Now if we could just address the current regulatory environment. While the Trump admin went too far in getting rid of some regulations, clearing out contradictory and poorly written regs to reduce compliance costs would help growth. The Biden admin is, of course, setting records for issuance of new high cost regulations. It would be nice to find a decent balance instead of whiplashing between these types of states.
The current regulatory environment is part of the reason energy production in the US is down. the other high impact regulations are negatively impacting supply. The inflation is due to supply shortages and overstimulated demand. Helping increase supply growth would help tame inflation. Not a huge impact for 2022, but would help reduce in 2023 and soften the landing for a shorter recession. I don’t think there’s any way to not have at lest a mild recession and get inflation down at this point.
Hostility to pipelines is a pretty obvious one, we’ve been pretty hostile to improving energy supply in the US.
We could also rewrite the book on how we regulate new nuclear plants which are now so expensive to get through the regulatory hoops it makes them nearly non-viable.
I think the Fed is going to nuke the economy. They are lagging consumer spending and they can’t do squat about the things driving the pricing increases.
Open hostility toward the oil /gas industry, until it’s inconvenient, then begging and pleading with the domestic and international players (some with very questionable human rights records). Someone should tell Biden that’s not a good look.
Seems we could use some of our bloated defense dept outlay to build some more government-owned refining capacity. Then when/if things get back to normal we can convert those facilities to something more useful.
I’m not for nationalizing the whole industry but if the private companies aren’t willing to meet demand then it seems appropriate for feds to step in.
Yeah, particularly natural gas export terminals seem like a compelling thing for the government to invest in, but it takes a few years for those to be built. If we had those already then the EU probably would have gone all the way on the Russian energy embargo.
That’s not the questions. The question is would you rather have ~2 years of recession with some job losses or long term continued inflation higher than earnings growth?
It’s not just $5 for gas. It’s an extra $60-100 a week for food, higher utility bills, …
Based on comments from farmers around here, food inflation is already locked in for next year. Fertilizer prices from this year will already increase food for next year, regardless of what happens. So timing said recession is more relevant imo than whether it should happen.
Q: do I get to keep my job? There are always businesses and workers whose jobs depend on a steady or growing economy. Are their jobs more important than the repo mans’?
What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes. Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.
Well every time there were 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth we since we created the term recession it was designated a recession. So that might not be the technical definition using the White House’s current newspeak but its been a VERY good indicator so far.
Sure, it is “current newspeak” if you literally ignore at least 80 years of reporting on business cycles, intentionally ignore the definition of recession that is widely published and reported on, and only rely on what most people understand to be a basic rule of thumb, not the actual determination.
Of course, I had to go to obscure economic web pages like Investopedia to see that.
And I couldn’t find any major news media using the “current newspeak” explaining that way prior to January 1982.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, the arbiter of the nation’s business cycles, declared yesterday that the current recession began last July. It was the eighth recession pronounced by the organization since the end of World War II.