Inflation or price-gouging?
Big business loves inflation talk.
You can’t turn around these days without bumping into scary inflation talk, and with good reason: asset bubbles, supply chain shocks and energy geopolitics are on their way to wiping out most or all of the wage gains eked out by low-waged workers during the pandemic’s labor shortage.
The underlying message of this scare-talk is that we’ve been too generous with “essential workers,” by allowing them to inch a little closer to a living wage, and now it’s time to roll that back, for their own good. What’s the point of making $0.50/h more if it costs you $1/h more just to eat, sleep and breathe?
The last time this happened, finance ghouls like Larry Summers made the call to sacrifice Americans’ savings and homes to keep the finance sector fat an happy. Today, he’s a major player in the Manchin Synematic Universe, insisting that we can’t save the planet or the people who do the essential work of keeping us alive. No one should listen to anything Larry Summers says. To (mis)quote Mary McCarthy, “Every word he writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
And yet, prices are going up, and people are feeling the pain. If it’s not being caused by…
