The Onion

Seriously. How tone-deaf do you have to be? It's condescending and treats people like children.

The inflation is actually something that could have been addressed with the proper messaging. They could have said, during the heart of it, "yes, I know inflation is bad. And we're doing everything we can to fight it. But realize that this is happening because of the stimulus efforts we made during the pandemic. We printed a bunch of money and used that to keep everyone afloat while everything shut down. The alternative was that we would face a wave of defaults, foreclosures, and evictions not seen since the 1930s. We avoided that economic disaster. But in turn we have some higher prices now. We will be doing everything we can to crack down on any corporate profiteering..." And then they could have proceeded to make public examples of any company that engaged in price-gouging. They could have just flat-out told the American people, "sorry, but we're going to have some higher prices. We are not gods, and this is the only tool in our toolkit we have for dealing with something the magnitude of what we faced in the pandemic." If they had done that, just laid it out all honestly and on the table, I think they would have won this election.

Instead they just papered over it. First inflation was "transitory." Then they just repeated "inflation adjusted wages" until they were blue in the face. Inflation numbers don't really reflect the lived experience of most people. I recall getting shouted down several times on r/economics for daring to point out the flaws in how we measure inflation, how different groups experienced different inflation rates, and how the methadologies really have been hacked over the decades to keep rates low.