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EB-Ch's avatar

Sorry, Arnold. I regret your list of GDP pitfalls doesn't include a very important one. You ignore how Government expenditure is misused as a measure of its output. GDP accounting is not only about private output and its market valuation, it's also about government output but not about government redistribution of private income. National accounting pretends to provide good measures of an economy's output, income, and consumption but to a large extent it has failed because of the many government interventions. Unfortunately, public economics textbooks still fail to explain those interventions and their consequences. It's amazing how much time we spend on monetary economics and how little on public economics --yes, this is a good reason to laugh at experts on monetary economics and the army of economists employed by central banks. Although you may prefer to laugh at your government, pay attention to what happened in Argentina yesterday and may happen later today.

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

"President Biden just happened to be in office when the bonfire was lit."

Total COVID spending dwarves previous ordinary budget deficits by a massive margin. Adding up the entire ordinary deficit of the Trump years wouldn't come close to COVID spending. Had COVID spending not happened, we would not be experiencing this inflation.

If you believe Democrats were the primary drivers of lockdown socialism (fair) and that Biden is nothing more then an empty suit stand in for the Democrats (fair) then I think its fair to blame him for the inflation.

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