Paul Krugman: "It's All Good... Really"

 No Paul, this tactic won't work either. *sigh*

You guys are going small; you should be thinking Big Picture.

Americans aren't just frustrated with the price of gasoline. Or food.  And it's not a temporary thing.  It's a ... malaise.  An idea that you just can't get ahead anymore, unless you are a part of the EliteClass to which Brooks and Krugman both belong.

The everyday workers are not heartened by "logical" thinking like this:

One way I like to look at this is to look at the ratio of the price of gasoline to the average worker’s hourly earnings. Right now this ratio is considerably lower than it was in the early 2010s. Gasoline prices did plunge in 2014 — yes, under Barack Obama, not Trump. But this reflected a surge in fracking, which actually did increase U.S. oil production enough to have a significant effect on world markets. Unfortunately the fracking boom turned out to be a bubble that eventually burned up more than $300 billion in investors’ money.

So gas prices probably won’t go back to the levels of the late 2010s, not because the Biden administration is hostile to oil production, but because those low prices depended on investors’ delusions about fracking’s profitability. Taking a longer view, as I said, gas isn’t actually expensive at this point.

Furthermore, experts believe that with some troubled refineries coming back online, gas prices will fall substantially over the next few weeks.

So what does this tell us about the success or failure of Biden administration policy? Very little. Biden’s jawboning of refiners over their margins might be having some effect; so might his release of extra oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Overall, however, it’s hard to think of a worse metric for judging a president and his party than a price determined mainly by events abroad and technical production issues here at home, a price that isn’t even high compared with, say, a decade ago.

Yet gas prices may sway a crucial election, a fact that is both ludicrous and terrifying.

Spinning back your comparables a decade to conclude "gas isn't actually expensive at this point" is a bit like... tripping your brains out, realizing how looong people have been living on earth, that it's pretty amazing really that all of us here at any given time are overlapping at all.  Thus, 19-year-olds and 56-somethings, what's age really??  

Do you buy that trippy reasoning, Paul?  Of course not.  It's twisting yourself to prove your conclusion.

American workers are getting shafted. No doubt about it. What New York City is just waking up to -- that thousands and thousands and thousands of newcomers in need of shelter, food, transportation and schooling are not just coming... They're here. -- is an economic reality the rest of the non-property-owners in your country understand.

More bodies, more social needs, less opportunities for all to advance themselves fairly means scarcities.  It means raised prices in all sectors.  It means ... the rich get richer, the poor and workers are living on less.  The investment class is hurting now too, but it's the working class that vote in ways that seem "ludicrous" and "terrifying" to property owners who don't understand what is happening in their own country anymore.

Manipulating the price of gas in the next few weeks won't stop winter from coming...  We know that.   

And trying to pretend that America's recent foreign-policy choices: the war in Ukraine and the recent OPEC response -- and the great green push to wean workers off fossil fuels into still-unaffordable electric vehicles -- have nothing to do with the price of gas today beggars belief.

How dumb do you think we are?  We were quiet for the past two years, grumbling amongst ourselves, but in America, in a very short time now until November voting day, the majority of the voters will be heard, the property-less, the workers, the non-elites all.

We don't think the government is helping the people with the policies they pass, and how they fund their projects and regulations with our tax dollars.  We want more say, and if you don't give it to us, we'll vote you out...

You can't impeach the American people, and we're done suffering financially while so many who do so little grow rich off our share of the work.  

Hard times ahead maybe, but the changes in the long run will break the log jam of economic stagflation so things will get flowing freely again in a more natural, less manipulated fashion.  

History tells us the establishment ways really got to go before it gets better...

#Respect.