From one Mark to another.
And this is why the dems got hammered this last election cycle, if inflation is so low, why is gas 50% higher than when trump left office, groceries, rent, utilities 40% higher now as compared to 2020?
It is because you and most people don't even have a high school-level understanding of basic economic terms let alone how the economy works.
This is how Google defines inflation: Inflation is the rate of increase in prices over a given period of time.
Do you get it now? I suspect you still don't. Let me break it down some more. Inflation is not synonymous with prices. Trump could prove me wrong and do a masterful job with inflation and a year from now, the inflation rate could fall to 1.6%, meaning Trump would have lowered inflation by 1%. However, that doesn't change the existing prices of your gas, rent, utilities and so on. It simply means that those prices are only going up at the rate of 1.6% per year now. Overall prices would be 41.6% higher than they were in 2020 using your example. Would you think the economy was still bad?
Prices do not go down just because the rate of inflation does. Demand for goods and services has to go down in order for prices to drop. If overall prices drop, then you have a negative inflation rate. A negative inflation rate is rare. If my glance at the table was accurate, it has only happened six times since 1929 and the last time it happened was in 1954. Those six years are the only time in our history since 1929 that overall prices have dropped after going up. What you and those other people expect to happen simply doesn't happen. For demand to fall enough to lower prices at all we would have to be in a severe recession or depression. Prices have a chance of falling then because people aren't working and can't afford to buy anything or if they are still working they fear for their own jobs and have cut back on spending which lowers demand. The only way to lower prices to 2020 levels would be for economic times to be incredibly bad like the great depression.
Another way to think about it is say your boss comes up to you and says isn't it great Trump won and is going to lower prices back to pre-pandemic levels. But you have to do your part to fight high prices we are going to lower your wages to 2020 levels so we can lower the prices we charge our customers. You would be all in on that right? Of course not!
By the same token say your employer is a large corporation that sells food products. Say the profit margin on gross sales is 10%. Do you think the board of directors has a meeting and concludes they can get by on a 5% margin for a few years in order to do our part to combat inflation so let's lower our prices and take less profit?
No that never happens. By law publically held corporations can't give away profits as they belong to the shareholders. If they lowered prices voluntarily and gave up profits their shareholders would sue them for the lost profits and they would win.
The only baloney is that you think your unwillingness to learn how things work makes you smart. I guess you were one of the folks who spiked Google search volume for how tariffs work and are tariffs taxes the day after the election. Fox News, Trump and the conservative media depend on folks like you with no intellectual curiosity to not look things up for yourself. They count on you to take their word for it that high prices can be brought back down by the President. Sadly, so many folks like you have outsourced their thinking to the conservative media.
Let's talk about the gas you mentioned. I try to be nice but you have to have been hit by a stupid stick if you think gas prices being low during the pandemic was some kind of brilliant economic achievement on Trump's part. Trump shut everything down. You didn't go anywhere unless you were an essential worker. Most businesses were closed as you conservatives liked to wine you couldn't even get a haircut. Do you want those gas prices again? It is very simple to get them. Have the government close everything down and the demand for gas will plummet again as nobody will be driving anywhere. Get it? It is all about demand. And to get those 2020 prices you want we would have to suffer some sort of catastrophic economic event like another Pandemic, another Great Depression or another World War.
