‘Stop the price-gouging’: Biden hits corporations over high consumer costs
Big business and junk fees prove easy targets for the White House in the inflation blame game.
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Yeah, it's totally nothing to do with his policies.
You are correct. Most of the world is experiencing price gouging and inflation.
Its just something that happens and there is nothing we can do about it. The market is like the weather sometimes it rains sometimes it pours.
You almost sound like you're in favor of market regulation. Yet, somehow I very much doubt that is true.
Why do you think I wouldn't be in favor of market regulation?
Well, to be honest, "nothing we can do about it".
My bad.
Ah sorry that was supposed to be sarcasm poking fun of the other commenters dismissal of the problem because "the entire world is experiencing this"
so no one can influence the "weather" here?
Give us one fucking Biden policy that caused this
🦗
Shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline and restricting domestic oil leases almost immediately increased the price of gas by 20 or so cents.
How the fuck is that related to price gouging? Are you having a stroke?
Making gas more expensive to produce will drive up the price you pay at the pump. It's not that difficult to understand, is it?
That's not price gouging though is it you dumb fuck? Have you even read the fucking article? It's always hilarious when an absolute buffoon tries to be ironic.
Alright, while your crude behavior doesn't exactly fill me with confidence about your receptivity for reason and evidence, let's take a look how Biden actually defines "price gouging":
"Any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even as the supply chains have been rebuilt, it's time to stop the price gouging"
This is either another one of his classic faux pas, or it's used as a propaganda term here, because on closer examination, this sentence reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between prices and inflation. Stay with me here, and I'll explain why, but I'm afraid it's going to require just a little of high school math.
Inflation is defined as the rate that prices rise, i.e. higher inflation = prices rise faster, lower inflation = prices rise slower. Read that last part again, because that means specifically that lower inflation does not mean prices go down. It means they go up more slowly. In order for prices to actually go down, inflation would have to be negative, which it currently isn't. Hence, Biden is either making a mathematical error here, or he is deliberately misleading people about the nature of the relationship between prices and inflation.
There you go, I hope that was clear enough. Now feel free to continue your verbal abuse, but I think it's amply clear who's the buffoon here.
You are correct
What policies, specifically?
Sending hundreds of billions of dollars to fight the war in Ukraine, for instance.
What, you thought we actually HAD hundreds of billions of dollars? They're all just printed from thin air and added to the national debt, and then inflation goes up as a result of the increased money supply.
Could you share where you got your number? The most recent source I found on google showed $44.2 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the invasion began. From what I can tell this doesn't include other humanitarian aid, so I wonder if that makes up the difference?
Whatever the case, if you have more info I'd appreciate it if you could share
Hm, I was under the impression there recently was a package of $100 billion being discussed, but it appears that at least some of that money was supposed to go to Israel, not to Ukraine, and I'm not entirely sure if it ever made it through the house.
As far as what's already been spent, the BBC has reported a total of $46.6 billion as of February 21 this year, and the Council of Foreign Relationships claims a total of $76.8 billion, of which the aforementioned $46.6 billion constitute the direct military aid.
Of the bill mentioned in the first paragraph, $61 billion would supposedly go to Ukraine, so if passed, this would definitely bring the total to over $100 billion. So I regretfully admit to having slightly exaggerated my figures for dramatic effect, and humbly beg for your forgiveness, but least I only missed the mark by a single order of magnitude, and we're still somewhere in the right ballpark.
Thanks for your reply! Some people on the internet don't respond to criticism well, I'm sure you know what I mean, so it's always nice when someone is chill about it.
I honestly don't follow politics too closely, so I wasn't aware of the bill you referenced. Thanks for filling me in!
And yeah, your point still stands regardless of the number. I don't personally know much about how the federal budget works, so I'm just here to learn.
If you don't mind telling me, what would be the ideal response by the US in your opinion? Would you have wanted us to send less (or zero) aid to Ukraine?
I honestly don't know, since I'm neither a politician nor a foreign policy expert, but it certainly seems to me that the critics were right on this one, and it was mostly a useless proxy war designed to fill the coffers of the morally ambiguous and well-connected elite at the cost of thousands of innocent human lives, so it seems that either preventing it from the getgo or not funding it all would have been the better choice. But hindsight is always 20/20.
Yes, if Putin had invaded and we had done nothing at all, some lives would have still been lost, but most likely the Ukrainian army would have folded much quicker and the death toll would have been much lower than it stands now. And let's not forget, the whole thing only started because Biden greenlit that Nordstream Two pipeline that Trump had spent his entire four years blocking for fear of precisely this incident. Literally within a week of the pipeline's approval, the first Russian boots were on Ukrainian soil, so whatever you think of the orange cheeto, it seems he was 100% on the money on this one.