Aside from priorities, is this even true? Is there any good reason to believe that inflation hits low-income households especially hard? 1/
Inflation redistributes from creditors to debtors — not exactly a burden on the bottom half of the income distribution 2/
The great disinflation after the 1970s was associated with soaring, not falling, inequality — mostly not causal, but hardly supportive of the claim 3/
"Inflation especially hurts the poor" has truthiness — it sounds like it should be true. But I don't see either evidence or a mechanism 4/

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More from @paulkrugman

10 Dec
Three rules for interpreting the CPI print coming in 10 minutes:

1. Don't make too much of one month's number
2. Don't make too much of one month's number
3. Don't make too much of one month's number

By the way, the same rules apply if it comes in lower than expected 1/
Also, of course, this report won't include the effects of the recent drop in oil prices 2/
The big questions won't be resolved today, although we're looking for clues. How much of what's happening is the bullwhip effect, i.e., shortages made worse by panic buying? 3/ bis.org/speeches/sp211…
Read 5 tweets
8 Dec
Willing to consider this. But I can't find any combination of numbers under which real wages are down enough to justify the extreme gloom consumers are reporting 1/
1 percent one way or the other surely can't be critical 2/
What I see 3/
Read 4 tweets
8 Dec
Still thinking about why Americans are so downbeat about the economy, inspired in part by this Simon Wren-Lewis piece about Britain — where voters say that the Tories are better for the economy, but Labour better for living standards (!) 1/ mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2021/12/they-l…
This seems to jibe with my suggestion that what people mean when they are asked about "the economy" doesn't connect very well to personal experience 2/ nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opi…
We are, after all, experiencing a rapid improvement in employment — actually an awesomely fast recovery in prime-age employment 3/
Read 6 tweets
28 Nov
So Republicans plan to run against inflation, while having zero ideas about how to bring it down 1/ nbcnews.com/politics/polit…
Noticeable that they're still blaming unemployment benefits for reducing labor supply — when this happens to be an experiment we've done, which failed 2/
Enhanced UI was cut off over the summer 3/
Read 6 tweets
23 Nov
As Arin says, Rattner committed chartcrime here. But there's a larger issue 1/
What the data actually show is that the US, which has done more fiscal stimulus than Europe, also has higher inflation. More careful people than Rattner have cited this as evidence that fiscal did it. But with only 2 data points, need to observe that other things are going on 2/
Europe came in to this with lower inflation than we did — ECB was less successful at achieving a 2% target. This baseline effect accounts for part of the difference 3/
Read 9 tweets
18 Nov
Need to guard against wishful thinking, but there do seem to be straws in the wind suggesting that supply-chain issues are getting less serious. Here's the Baltic Dry Index of shipping costs 1/
Big retailers seem to be doing fine on inventory for the holidays 2/ cnn.com/2021/11/16/inv…
Given the way these things typically work, I wouldn't be surprised if we hit peak inflation panic just as actual inflation is fading away 3/
Read 4 tweets

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