Via Hot Air's "Sunday Smiles" post, a brief history of journalism's service to the throne:
Since I am an occasional skeptic of too-good-to-check memes, I looked for the originals. First up was George Calhoun in Forbes, the article dated May 1, 2021, a little under three months into the Biden presidency: The Inflation Scare Doesn’t Match Reality. Calhoun (identified as "Quantitative Finance Program Director, at Stevens Inst. of Technology") quotes the WSJ and Barron's warning of incipient inflation. And says: nuts to that:
The 2021 Inflation Scare is another in a series of false alarms going back several decades. It may not quite qualify as Fake News, but it is close.
Start with this Plain Fact: Inflation has disappeared from the U.S. economy. The Core Consumer Price Index has not exceeded 3% since 1995.
No American consumer under the age of 50 or so has ever had to make an adult economic decision in the context of significant inflation. (At my university, it is a struggle to get students to imagine what inflation would feel like. It’s like asking them to conceive of a world where their phones would have to be permanently tethered to the wall by a cord!)
It's as if George never read a standard financial disclaimer: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
Second is from Jeff Cox, in a CNBC article dated just a few weeks later than Calhoun's, June 26: Inflation looks bad now, but it's pretty much sticking to the script.
Under normal circumstances, the recent spate of high inflation numbers would be cause for high alarm.
But in the present Covid-era context, they were confirmation in some quarters that the inflation picture is doing little more than following the script, rising due to one-off bottlenecks and the product of a distorted comparison to a year-ago period that saw much of the U.S. economy in shutdown mode.
[…]
“It was right down the strike zone,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said of Friday’s Commerce Department release. The PCE level is “consistent with the idea that the surge in inflation will be transitory, that it’s related to the reopening of the economy and some of disruptions that are resulting from that quick reopening.”
Ah, I remember Team Transitory. Good times.
The meme's third entry is a bit of a fumble. It appears to be a since-deleted MSNBC tweet, which pointed twits to a James Surowiecki article (November 8, 2021). The article's current headline (and for all I know, the one it's always had) is far less stupid: How Covid became the unlikely hero of our inflation crisis.
Does Surowiecki claim that 2021-era inflation is a "good thing"? Not really, but he does put a Pollyannish spin on it:
At the same time, any discussion of inflation needs to include the context in which it’s happening. Historically, recessions have left Americans poorer, not better off. But the Covid recession was different. As people shifting their habits drastically in response to the pandemic, they spent much less and saved more. Even though millions of Americans lost their jobs, enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus payments left many of them better off, not worse. And the stock market, after initially falling, boomed.
The result of all this was that Americans ended 2020 $13.5 trillion richer than they were at the beginning of the year. Most of that wealth increase went, of course, to the already wealthy. But lower-income households benefited, too. The JP MorganChase Institute found, for instance, that the bottom 25 percent of income earners had 50 percent more in their checking accounts in October 2020 than they did a year earlier. So lots of Americans came into 2021 with money in their pockets. And since then, we’ve seen the sharpest recovery from a recession since World War II, one that’s driven the unemployment rate down to 4.6 percent, and wages up almost 5 percent year-over-year.
Don't worry, be happy. With the context.
And finally, we come to Annie Lowrey's December 1, 2023 article in the Atlantic. And her headline is, indeed: Inflation Is Your Fault.
You would think, with prices as high as they are, that Americans would have tempered their enthusiasm for shopping of late; that they would have pulled back spending on luxury items; that they would have sought out budget and basic options, bought smaller packages, fewer things.
This is not what has happened. Consumer spending rose 0.2 percent, after accounting for higher prices, in October, the most recent month for which the government has data. Online shopping jumped 7.8 percent over the Thanksgiving long weekend, more than analysts had anticipated. The sales of new cars, dishwashers, cruise vacations, jewelry—all things people tend to give up when they are watching their budget—remain strong. Consultants keep anticipating a recession precipitated by the “death of the consumer.” Thus far, the consumer is staying alive.
The headline is needlessly provocative, but it's just another way of saying: prices are staying high because consumer demand is staying high. Also (arguably) not clownish.
Bottom line: Writing in 2021, Calhoun and Cox were wrongly optimistic about inflation. The Surowiecki/Lowrey examples are more of a mixed bag, calling attention to the economy's positive indicators, downplaying inflation. Not wrong, but more unbalanced than clownish.
Also of note:
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Probably some would see that as a good thing. J.D. Tuccille points out that Ending Section 230 Would Kill the Internet as We Know It.
Described as "the 26 words that created the internet," Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act catches a lot of flak for a piece of legislation that is largely responsible for online platforms' willingness to host discussion forums. In its absence, social media companies and message boards would likely return to the previous era of either allowing anybody to say anything, or else taking legal responsibility for every insult and slur posted on their platforms. That would probably mean the end of online discourse as we know it—which may be what happens if proposed bipartisan legislation "sunsets" Section 230.
I'm an occasional commenter on various websites. As an old fogy, I continue to find that most comment sections are "USENET, reinvented poorly."
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I see this as a good thing. Eric Boehm reports from the convention floor, or close to it: Chase Oliver Is the 2024 Libertarian Party Presidential Nominee.
Oliver won the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination in dramatic fashion Sunday night, prevailing on the seventh round of balloting after running second in each of the first five rounds. Oliver received 60.6 percent of the vote in the final round, finally clearing the 50 percent threshold for victory against "none of the above," the only alternative that remained on the ballot after Oliver narrowly won a sixth-round showdown with professor-turned-podcaster Michael Rectenwald, who had led the count in each of the first five rounds.
"I am extending my hand. Take it, and be a partner with me in liberty," Oliver said in his victory speech, making a pitch to his opponents within the Libertarian Party, which has been riven for the past two years by a deep divide over tactics and principles.
Boehm notes that Oliver's nomination is "a blow to the Mises Caucus", to which I say "Yipeee!"
Further fun fact that almost certainly won't happen at either the Republican or Democrat conventions later this year:
For much of Sunday's lengthy balloting process, it seemed like Rectenwald might narrowly prevail—even after giving a rambling, somewhat incoherent speech on Saturday night, after which he admitted that he'd been high on an edible.
Far out, dude.
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And I see this as a "cognitive dissonance" thing. Billy Binion notes some ambivalence: Trump Promises To Free Ross Ulbricht, Yet He Wants To Execute Drug Dealers.
"We're going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs," former President Donald Trump said in November 2022 as he launched his 2024 presidential campaign, "to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts."
That promise was not an offhand remark; it has been core to Trump's platform. Which made one of his comments yesterday at the Libertarian National Convention all the more interesting. "I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht," he said, referring to the man serving two life sentences plus 40 years for a slew of convictions, including distributing narcotics. Ulbricht's legal troubles stem an online marketplace he founded and operated called the Silk Road, where users could buy and sell illegal substances.
Every time I say "Yeah, maybe I could vote for Trump" someone points out stuff like this.
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