Just thought I’d say it, because nobody seems to be. Below, the top graph is gas, bottom graph is crude oil.
People were stupid enough to blame the rise on the President. But the President, praise the Lord, was not stupid enough to take credit for the fall. Yet. Though he did remark on it as being a good thing.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis data system (FRED).
Yet, somehow, inflation is still uniquely the Presidents fault? You betcha?
Source: Financial Times.
Of course that must be the President’s fault. Everybody says so.
But everybody is too stupid even to recall who was President when various stimulus packages were passed. Here’s a detailed 2020 timeline, and unless I’ve gone blind, the guy who signed the first stimulus package and pushed for a second one appears to be someone other than the current President.
Source: Extracted from a full and detailed timeline on AJMC.com
Of course we passed a stimulus package. As did every other Western industrialized nation. Ours was middle-of-the-road.
Source: McKinsey.
And apparently we’ve all forgotten why those were passed. I guess it would have been preferable to continue with the early-pandemic rate of unemployment?
Or maybe people didn’t own any stocks or have any retirement plan, so they somehow missed having the Dow plummet 20% in a month?
Source: Both of the above are from the St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED system.
People will argue that we only had that unemployment rate because the Federal government shot itself in the foot by mandating all those “shutdowns”.
Those people forget a few things.
The first of which is that it was state governors who set the rules, not the Feds. Although the Feds offered advice. South Dakota, in particular, proudly didn’t shut down anything. Doesn’t anybody recall the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally? But in August 2020, I believe they advised places where 10 or more might gather without social distancing to consider changing their practices (Google link). That was about it.
And yet …
Source: Ycharts.
Source: State of South Dakota.
Gosh, if I didn’t know any better, it’s almost as if the spread of an airborne deadly disease might somehow discourage shopping and dining all on its own. Without any help from the government. People who blame the Feds for the last couple of years’ troubles never pondered that most of the population had enough sense to try to avoid a disease that (at that time) had an eight percent case mortality rate. Even in uber-conservative nothing-shall-close South Dakota. Rules or no rules, I think a lot of people had the good sense to stay out of crowds for a while. And if that meant (e.g.) restaurants, so be it.
Wait, did I say shutdowns? Ah, no, that’s not nearly ape-shit-crazy-delusional enough for some people. If you really need just one red flag for identifying a complete right-wing bullshitter, just listen for reference to those awful federally-mandated lockdowns that we all suffered through. A “lockdown” defined as being confined to your home, and unable to travel, under threat of penalty or arrest.
But Federally-mandated lockdowns it is.
Why? Because if you’re going to do a two minute’s hate, you have to have an imaginary evil enemy to rail against. Reality, in this case, simply was not evil enough.
First, any restrictions on commerce were mandated by the Governors of the various states, not the feds. One state, two state, red state, blue state. We all had ’em, to a greater or lesser degree, with one exception (see above).
Second, more importantly, at least as far as I can recall, nobody actually imposed (or certainly, enforced) a lockdown on anybody. Where, again, a lockdown is like what they had in Communist China, where people were literally confined to their homes under threat of arrest if found outside of their homes.
I don’t know how things shaped up where you live. But in Virginia — typical for most states, I think — any travel to or from work, worship, or school was always allowed. And in terms of shopping, not only wasn’t there a lockdown, there was, as far as I could tell, no case of anybody being so much as fined for not wearing a mask during periods when those were mandated in certain public places.
In particular, in Virginia, restrictions only applied to settings where the public might gather. And even then, the list of “essential” retail establishments exempt from closure was large. And any time you needed to visit any essential business, at any time during the pandemic, that was fine. Ignoring the fact that nothing was enforced, anyway. Ignoring that most retail and other situations also remained open, most of the time, subject to capacity limits. Here’s all the retail that remained open, at all times in the pandemic, where you could go to and shop to your heart’s content, throughout the pandemic.
I don’t know about you, but anybody who can look at that list and claim that we were in “lockdown” in Virginia is just plain making stuff up. Let alone Federally-mandated lockdown.
I could go on, but I guess my only point is, haven’t we had enough dumb-assery to last us a while? Do we really have to keep making shit up and forgetting the past, rather than have any actual debate over any of the problems actually facing the country?
I’m afraid we all know the answer to that.
