The Zinger That Wasn't

 

Some effort to award young Doocy a point over the new White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday, in her official debut, on the part of this RealClear reporter:

I don't know whether the story is going to have any legs or not, but in the first place, everybody but billionaires and MMTers recognizes that raising taxes is a way to reduce inflation—inflation is when there's too much money circulating, and taxation pulls the money out of circulation. Though its effectiveness must depend on who or what is getting taxed, and what possible side effects it might have; some Bloomberg idiot at WaPo writes, for instance, that it can cause an overtime rejection crisis among the fed-up workers

Stop Trying to Make Fear Happen

 

You know what they say about the 1960s,  "If you can remember it, you probably weren't there"? There's something like that going on about inflation in the 1970s, as in this column by Barron's retirement columnist, Neal Templin:

When I was a young reporter in the 1980s, my newspaper gave me raises twice a year for a while. I’d like to tell you I earned the salary boosts through extraordinary merit, but all the reporters got them.

The reason: The inflation rate was so high then that it was considered a hardship to go a full year between raises. Amazing, huh?

Stupid Economist Tricks: Sex, Lies, and Deficit Terror

Tom Toles did not cite a source for that 97% figure. Then again, unlike Michael Strain, he is paid to be a cartoonist.

Actually, no, no sex, just Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, warning readers of The New York Times that

Biden Is Asking for $4 Trillion. Congress Shouldn’t Give It to Him.

He seems to like this headline format. Last time I had reason to deal with him, in 2015, it was with reference to a WaPo piece recommending the repeal of the Affordable Care Act:

End Obamacare, and people could die. That's okay.

Spoiler: my commentary concluded that it was not okay. And the GOP Congress, failing to end Obamacare, sort of agreed! I mean not exactly, but we won.

Anyway, the reason Strain would like Congress to refuse Biden the money, or at least the $3.5 trillion of it to be appropriated through the budget reconciliation process without requiring any Republican votes, is ostensibly the raging inflation he (Michael Strain) sees and expects to see continuing through next year even without this extra spending, and which would surely be aggravated by the increased demand for stuff (where "demand" means, as it usually does in this style of economics, "ability to pay for things you really need that you couldn't afford before") that the spending on the expanded child tax credit in particular will bring on by yanking people out of their God-appointed poverty, while the Biden administration makes no plans for increasing the supply of stuff, other than by PROVIDING THE UNIVERSAL FREE PRE-K EDUCATION that recipients of the child tax credit are most likely to be spending it on, but you can't expect Strain to make that connection.

So in the course of his argument he gives a lot of attention to an analysis of the Biden program by Moody's, in which for some reason he doesn't offer a link to it:

Honey I shrunk the OJ

While we weren't looking the 1/2 gallon of juice turned into 13/32. Bad times.

Everything that rises might converge...

...though you can't count on that either.

Colorado Springs Hot Air Balloon Competition, via Wikipedia.

BooMan has taken up the economic insanity of the Republican candidates, in very fine form, but one of the points he made caused some surprise in the readership over there:

It’s cute to see the Journal sound concerned about the fate of Dodd-Frank. After all, reviling the banks and bank bailouts while simultaneously demonizing the law that seeks to regulate them is exactly how this marriage is supposed to work. That’s precisely the kind of wink-and-a-nod politics that has defined the Bush-Goldwater-Wallace coalition from the beginning.

Still, it’s hard to take having to listen to Donald Trump bash free trade, Ted Cruz advocate the Gold Standard and Rand Paul blame the Fed for inflation that doesn’t exist.

"Whaddaya mean inflation doesn't exist, do you know how much a dozen eggs cost? And my rent's up 10%!" Which is actually a reasonable question, though that doesn't stop Boo from being right.

They're talking a little past each other, neither side quite getting what the other side is talking about, so I decided to write a longish comment, which is the only thing I've really written today, so here it is:

Annals of Derp: Faint praise

Update: Slightly revised for intelligibility

Reginald Denny in Harry A. Pollard's Oh, Doctor! (1925)

David Brooks congratulating America on its success in getting a grip on health care inflation, but with a couple of caveats: (a) it ain't happening, and (2) well, maybe it is, but Obama and the Affordable Care Act shouldn't get any credit for it.

The funniest bit is with reference to the first of those, where he takes a number for the current health costs inflation rate in the US, 1.1%, and next year's projected number for health costs inflation growth rate, 6.5%, and practically faints, because ZOMG that's a scary surge:

Namely, in paragraph 3, with data from the Council of Economic Advisers,

“Health care prices have grown at an annual rate of 1.6 percent since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in March 2010, the slowest rate for such a period in five decades, and those prices have grown at an even slower 1.1 percent rate over the 12 months ending in August 2015”

and then in paragraph 12, with data from "some firms":