I confess — I’m not a fan of incorrect claims about important matters of policy and politics, and even more so when those claims go viral and take on a meme-like quality. It seems like everywhere you go, people chat about “Bidenflation” and “Joe Biden’s inflation.” I find it quite annoying, especially since it’s extremely […]
I confess — I’m not a fan of incorrect claims about important matters of policy and politics, and even more so when those claims go viral and take on a meme-like quality. It seems like everywhere you go, people chat about “Bidenflation” and “Joe Biden’s inflation.” I find it quite annoying, especially since it’s extremely idiotic.
The fact is: inflation is slamming most of the world, and many notable countries have it much worse than we do here in the United States. (See video below.) An inquiring persons who actually wants to get to the bottom of things might ask, “hey, why is the world in an inflation crisis?” Well, some news you might have missed: a massive global pandemic hit the world a few years ago; countries almost entirely shut down, which meant their economies shut down; and governments dealt with the economic disruption by giving out a lot of money to keep people and businesses alive and well.
Let’s get a little more nuanced, though, since that doesn’t cover the full story at all. With the COVID-19 shutdowns, supply chains shut down and then got totally out of whack. As economies started opening up, it was like trying to restart a giant machine — and a machine that had a bunch of rust in some areas, bolts stuck in other areas, broken connections and hoses, etc. In other words, everything didn’t just switch back on all at once at the snap of a finger. This led some prices to rise — quite a lot in some cases. Those higher prices led some companies to say, “hey, we’ve got to raise prices to cover our costs and still make money.” Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat — more prices go up, more companies have to raise prices, etc.
Unfortunately, with word going around that prices were going up, some companies (or a lot of companies) used the opportunity to jack up prices even more than needed while blaming it on the matters above. For example: say there’s an 8% increase in your company’s costs, but your company goes on and increases the price of its product to 20% more, and simply blames it all on inflation, supply chain woes, etc. This is a key problem we’ve been having, and it goes far beyond what happens in the United States of America.
We’re rolling into the midterms here in the USA. Much power is on the line and much is being decided because of inflation. One should, in theory, recognize that US inflation is better than UK inflation, European inflation, Mexican inflation, German inflation, Turkish inflation, Brazilian inflation, etc.
What does this have to do with cleantech? Well, Democrats — with the slim majority they’ve had in the past couple of years — have passed massive cleantech packages, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Elections have consequences. The Republican Party is heavily supported by fossil fuel companies, because the GOP time and again does the bidding of fossil fuel companies and fights cleantech progress. Democrats have brought historic cleantech progress policy wise, and removing them with Republicans will no doubt halt such progress and perhaps even try to reverse it. Vote wisely.
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Source: Clean Technica