Stupid? Ignorant? Hapless?

 US Presidents don't cause or change inflation.

They have no power over inflation, either in its creation or its reduction.

They are like the rest of us; they go to the store and pay whatever the price is.

If there is a control mechanism on inflation, it is the Federal Reserve.

So why do American voters hold the President responsible for inflation and believe that trump had anything to do with the fact that it was under control when he was in, and will banish it again once re-elected?

Maybe they are just plug stupid?

***

Joe Biden signed various bills early in his presidency during the still-raging pandemic into laws that were proposed and voted into existence by the House and the Senate; those laws put a lot of money into the economy; they may have contributed to an inflationary cycle already caused by pandemic driven shutting down and then trying to re-start the world's biggest economy.

They also saved millions of Americans from disaster.

So why do American voters hold the President responsible FOR inflation, not the President AND the Congress for, MAYBE, CONTRIBUTING to that inflation? 

Maybe they are just plug stupid?

***

Inflation happens like the ticking of a clock.

If it stops or goes in reverse really bad things happen.

That's called deflation.

That's what happened in the Great depression.

A steady low rate of inflation is the lubrication for a healthy economy.

Occasionally inflation ramps up to higher than healthy levels for a variety of reasons, but never due to the connivance or incompetency of an American president, who has no power over inflation's waxing or inflation's waning.

The American public feel that higher than healthy inflation after businesses raise their prices which they do to protect their profit.

Sometimes businesses take advantage of the situation and raise their prices even more than inflation.

In any event that raising is a one-way road.

Prices never go down again.

Never have, never will.

Except during the Great Depression.

Only the rate of inflation ever goes down again, maybe, if the Federal Reserve, not the president, is successful in its inflation control manipulation of interest rates.

So why do the voters hold the President responsible for high prices and think he is lying when he says that inflation has come down massively, which it has, even though prices haven't come down at all, which they never will, unless we have a depression?

Maybe they are just plug stupid?

***

And why are the republicans blaming the Vice President, not the President?

Don't they know that the Vice President only gets to do anything meaningful in the event of being elevated to the Presidency?

Maybe they are just plug stupid?

More probably they are lying.

***

donnie says he has discovered the ultimate cornucopia of tax-free money: universal and very high tariffs.

He says he is going to stick it to China.

He's going to put huge tariffs on everything China sells to the United States and "with all that money, all that beautiful money, China pays us, we are going to cut American taxes to the bone; you're gonna get tired of having so much money left over each month" (quote is an approximation).

The problem is that it doesn't work that way.

American import companies pay the tariffs.

And they add that cost to the price they charge Walmart, Amazon and Costco.

And Walmart, Amazon and Costco add that cost to what they charge customers.

That's called inflation.

So why does donnie keep saying what he is saying about tariffs.

Maybe he's a liar?

Maybe he's just plug stupid?

Maybe both?

***

These are questions, the answers to which I struggle daily to find.

And I think I know the answer to those questions - at least for the republicans and the voters; donnie is an entirely different deal.

The republicans are not stupid, they are lying.

The voters are not stupid; they are throwing a tantrum.

It works for their kids so they assume it will work for them.

So always remember what George Washington said in 1788.

"There cannot, in my judgement, be the least danger that the President will by any practicable intrigue ever be able to continue himself one moment in office, much less perpetuate himself in it; but [in modern parlance substitute 'except' for 'but'] in the last stage of corrupted morals and political depravity; and even then there is as much danger that any other species of domination would prevail. Though, when a people have become incapable of governing themselves and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes".