@honestpollster Interesting. What do you think the common ground is on abortion? Border security? Gender surgeries for kids? Or even the eradication of Jews and Christians?
"Why do prices keep going up?"
I'd be happy to explain why prices keep going up...Inflationary monetary policy.
"Why do we have inflationary monetary policy?"
Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the primary one is that politicians really like to spend money, because it's an easy way to buy votes. The problem is politicians don't make money, so they have to get it through one of 3 primary ways...
1. They can tax...which is how they get most of it, but there is a point where taxation has diminishing returns because taxing someone too much leads to a lack of productivity or avoidance strategies.
2. They can borrow...which is one of their favorites because it allows them to kick the can down the road when it comes to actually paying for things; the problem is that at some point the government's credit isn't very good, and people don't want to voluntarily loan them money anymore.
3. They can print it...which is what we have been doing for a long time now. It's especially damaging because when the government prints a bunch of money to spend, it doesn't immediately cause all the prices to go up, so when the government spends the money, they are getting close to the full value of the dollar at the time that it is spent...it is only after the new paper dollars have started to circulate without a corresponding increase in supply that more dollars are competing over the same amount of goods and services and thus the prices go up, because the value of each dollar has gone down through money printing ie. "inflationary monetary policy."
Eventually the inflation gets so bad that they have to stop printing and spending, but that only decreases inflation; it doesn't end it, so prices don't go down to where they were; they simply stop increasing at the previous rate.
"Well, why don't they fix it?"
Because it would cause the economy to significantly, albeit temporarily, tank, and then whatever party was not in charge would blame the party that was in charge, and the citizens suffering the most from inflationary monetary policy would punish the party that stopped the inflationary monetary policy.
"So what's the answer?"
Well...the American people could start getting a lot more educated and concerned about the dangers of fiat currency combined with an ever-expanding welfare state and economic central planning, or the system can keep going until it reaches a critical mass, collapses, and we go through a lot more pain than would have otherwise been required...
@GuntherEagleman The fact that he is trying, supposedly, to get the voters to focus on midterms so he can pass the save act down the road is astonishingly narrow-minded. It's really incredible that he thinks the voter base is this stupid.