The cartoon at the top of this post was inspired by a story about Thanksgiving and how inflation has increased the cost of our annual food fest.
Some people have blamed Joe Biden for the current wave of inflation (assuming inflation comes in waves and right now I’m stuck for a better metaphor so let’s go with it) and I wanted to know if that was accurate so I googled “what’s causing inflation” and the first thing that came up was a story from the Wall Street Journal.
According to the Journal, inflation is at its highest rate in 31 years, mainly due to supply and labor shortages, high demand and imbalances in the economy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and I’m pretty sure they were going to tear the Biden Administration a new one before the article was over, but halfway through the second paragraph, the article faded out on the screen and the Journal website wanted me to sign in or subscribe, which I’m not going to do, but I’m kinda glad they asked.
Here’s why.
When the internet (AKA “A Series of Tubes”) first became a thing newspapers made the decision to give away their stuff for free and who knew giving away your product for free might affect the number of people willing to pay for it except absolutely everyone who wasn’t napping during Econ 101?
And now newspapers are trying to walk back that poorly thought-out decision with varying degrees of success.
Before I got fired by the Kansas City Star the first time (and I argued that everybody else ought to get fired once before I got fired twice – a seemingly-reasonable argument they didn’t buy) I argued that at least part of newspapers’ problems were due to poor-to-non-existent marketing because if you can convince people to buy water or $4 cups of coffee, you ought to be able to convince them to buy a newspaper.
But newspapers have been slow to advertise because for a long time they really didn’t need to and now they really don’t want to because that would mean giving money to competitors like TV and radio, so the ads for newspapers tend to run in newspapers which is kind of like printing up posters to advertise a concert and putting the posters inside the concert hall where the only people who will see the posters advertising the concert are the people who already bought a ticket.
But what do I know, I’m just a cartoonist.
And you’d think newspapers have a pretty good selling point in an era when there are so many fake news stories and you don’t know who’s credible and who’s making shit up or repeating something their crazy uncle said during Thanksgiving dinner and that being the case you’d think being a trusted source of information would be a pretty good marketing ploy.
As I’m sure some of you are already thinking – and if you’re not, you should – newspapers have their own problems and some might come from a point of view you don’t agree with and just by choosing certain stories to publish and other stories to ignore they show their own bias, all of which is true, but if you work for a legitimate newspaper and totally make stuff up you can still get fired for that, and you can’t say the same for people who put batshit crazy stories on social media and I think I’ll stop talking about this right now because it’s starting to sound a little too close to home.
Anyway…
Inflation is now on our never-ending list of problems and I wanted to read articles about what caused it and since the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t let me read their article I went to the second article on the list and it was from the New York Times which also has a pay wall, but for some reason I could see the whole article which seems like some kind of mistake on the Times part, but as someone once pointed out you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if he’s delivering free articles and so far I think I’m batting 1-for-3 on worthwhile metaphors.
So here’s what the Times had to say about the causes of inflation and if anything is humorous or entertaining, I added that because newspapers have made the industry-wide decision that reading their stuff should be dull and boring and — if possible — painful and what could possibly go wrong with that plan?
And a-way we go.
President Biden, Congress and the Federal Reserve
The Times article said Presidents have less control over the economy than people think, but said you could still blame Joe Biden and Congress for some of the inflation we’re seeing, just not all of it.
Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods and services and $2.8 trillion in federal pandemic relief has been dumped into the economy (and I’ve noticed Conservatives only complain about the money given to poor people and not the money given to business owners), but the article pointed out that in many cases the relief money just replaced the income of people who lost their jobs, so it wasn’t $2.8 trillion dumped on top of everything else.
And spending only went up 0.4% so that means there are other factors that don’t include Joe Biden playing Daddy Warbucks and I think right now is a good time to ask just what the fuck was Harry Connick Jr. thinking?
If that reference is lost on you, clearly you haven’t spent the last four days watching football and the ads they repetitively shove down your throat and this one’s for a new version of Annie and this time she’s Black and possibly transgender with eating disorders and I have absolutely no problem with any of that, but do have a problem with the lack of creativity in the entertainment industry where one person comes up with something original and then dozens of talentless hacks start spinning off versions of the original idea until you have an All-Female Ghostbusters and 10 Fast & Furious movies and come to think of it I’ve seen pretty much all of them which goes a long way in explaining why those talentless hacks do it.
To my dwindling credit there are six Sharknado movies – sharks falling out of the sky because they were swept up in tornadoes which I believe conclusively proves climate change is real – and I haven’t seen any of those movies and definitely won’t unless I find out Vin Diesel rides a Great White Shark and fights Jason Statham riding a hammerhead, because – as unlikely as this might seem – I’ve got standards.
The Times article put some of the blame on the Federal Reserve and their monetary policies, but also said anything the Fed does takes so long to get through the pipeline and affect consumer prices you don’t know if they could have stopped inflation if they’d done something sooner.
OK, so Biden, Congress and the Fed are part of the problem – who else can we blame?
Corporate America
It turns out newspaper executives are not the only ones who failed to read the economic tea leaves correctly and made bad decisions, and when the pandemic hit a lot of people thought there was going to be a big decline in economic activity, so automakers cut back production, airlines cancelled orders for new jets, energy companies cancelled drilling projects and car rental companies sold their fleets because who could have possibly predicted that people reluctant to get on an airplane with other people might want to rent cars instead?
And everybody started firing workers.
According to the Pew Research Center (and I cannot read that name without thinking about a cartoon skunk so you’re not dealing with the most mature mind in the world here) about 9.6 million workers have lost their jobs during the pandemic.
But it turned out the economic slump was shorter than most people thought it would be and now carmakers wish they hadn’t cancelled orders for semiconductors, car rental companies are trying to add vehicles and companies are having labor shortages because they fired too many workers and now would be a good time to remember that the people who run these companies are paid enormous salaries for their business expertise and when it turns out they had their heads up their asses, they don’t get fired or take a pay cut; that only happens to the workers whose future they fucked up with bad decisions.
Like giving away their product for free on the internet.
According to salary.com, the year I got fired – 2017 – the CEO of McClatchy made $2,358,420 in cash compensation, equity and “other” which I’m going to assume means a team of naked concubines whose main job was peeling his grapes so he could throw them at the slaves building a pyramid in his honor.
Here’s the salary.com link:
And the CEO did such a good job firing people in 2017, that the next year they increased his cash compensation, equity and naked concubine expense allowance to $2,877,450 an increase of $519,030 which is enough to keep ten people employed; 20 if you paid them crap which is pretty much the exact amount you might find yourself willing to work for if you lose your job.
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
So when companies whine that they can’t find workers (and always remember to add “for the amount we’re willing to pay them”) keep in mind that in many cases they need those workers to come back to work because they panicked and fired them.
And then there’s the rest of us
According to the Times article, Americans shifted their spending toward stuff and away from services; so more washing machines and fewer full-body massages with Happy Endings…not that I have any experience with that.
And a lot of people have made the decision to not go back work and a lot of other people blame Joe Biden and the extra unemployment benefits for that, but even the Flaming Liberals at the Wall Street Journal say that’s not exactly the case.
According to the first paragraph-and-a-half of another Wall Street Journal story published in September, the states that ended the extra unemployment benefits early saw about the same job growth as the states that kept paying them, so what in the name of Karl Marx is going on?
If five minutes of internet research are any indication: it turns out nobody knows for sure and the people who look into this kind of stuff are currently looking into it, but one of the leading theories is that the pandemic gave people a chance to work from home and prove that could work and now they don’t want to go back to their jobs, especially if those jobs suck.
Restaurant and hotel workers are some of the most likely people to quit working and one of those workers said he was tired of dealing with assholes who don’t want to wear masks so the people who are screaming that Americans are lazy are one of the reasons those lazy Americans don’t want to work anymore.
Here are two NPR articles about the resignation phenomenon and it will help if you imagine them being read by Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon from that SNL sketch and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can spend the next six minutes and 14 seconds laughing your ass off:
OK, so keep Ana and Molly in mind if you choose to read these articles:
So the shortage of workers led employers to offer higher wages and that led to increase in prices of services and goods because if there’s one thing that isn’t going to happen, it’s corporations and the CEOs that run them making less money.
In conclusion
The New York Times article concluded that you could give part of the blame for inflation to Biden, Congress and the Fed, part to Corporate America and part of it to the rest of us and the changes in our habits, but the underlying cause of all that stuff is the pandemic, so now you can blame the CIA or China or all those cooking shows where some foodie travels to Bumfuck, Egypt and eats a bat.
And my money’s on the foodie.
Heya Lee! Hope you had a good Thanksgiving weekend. Funny you should mention the free content on newspaper sites, because I am a faithful reader of the Kansas City Star and they've been being bitched about on their FB feed for months because of the paywall. They've also nixed the comment sections that used to run on the actual story page (that's only open to subscribers), probably because they've turned into such bloodbaths. But they allow ANYBODY to comment on their Facebook feed, so half the comments are from people bitching about the paywall and the other half from people who say the Star is a left-wing commie rag that isn't fit for wrapping newspapers. The people who leave these two types of comments, strangely enough, continue to follow the FB feed of this newspaper they think is such a piece of shit. :D
I have a cheapie subscription to the New York Times so I can get minimal access to it. I used to have a WaPo digital sub too, but I dropped it for some reason. I wrote for a living for a couple of years in my early twenties and I remember those years as a food stamp eligible, no-working-vehicle, hauling-laundry-on-the-city-bus-to-the-laundromat nightmare. Meaning I don't have a hell of a lot of patience with people who expect reporters to work for free.
I miss your cartoons at the Star but love your blog! Happy holidays.