Inflation sucks. What also sucks is that the vast sub-middle class is now being financially choked for doing what this country breeds and socializes that class to do: over-consuming. If it was 98% impossible for an average non-engineer to find a dignified job a year ago in a job market where companies were hiring but nobody was getting hired, it is now 99.9% impossible as companies embrace cost-cutting mode.
Rising prices are hugely driven by normalized corporate greed, and many companies that raise prices do it because they can get away with it. Monopolies are alive and well. Yet, we're often blaming inflation on workers who have finally experienced a short-lived period of rising wages after decades of stagnation, and we stupidly debate the merits of direct government giving of no-strings-attached cash to citizens in dire need. Why don't we blame inflation on the tech-dominated advertising industry, where the quaint motto “don't be evil” has to be ignored when it's a liability to the bottom line? How about indicting the profit motive and the planet-killing extraction of shareholder value and consumerism writ large? American companies and policies force demand into our brains while inflation & rising interest rates disproportionately hit consumers at the bottom.
Homeownership, historically, protects against inflation. But in market crashes where housing prices decline, the ability to get a home loan becomes reserved for only the affluent with their tip-top credit scores, extensive collateral, and connections. If homeownership is our primary mechanism of creating inter-generational wealth, then we might reframe the lax lending standards that contributed to the housing crash of 2007 as kinda progressive and good. What was bad was taking vulnerable people's houses away. This country once tried 40 acres and a mule as policy, and we should head back in that direction. As is, hordes of struggling people who will likely never own homes are doomed to empty their bank accounts into their wealthy landlords' bank accounts in a regressive reverse-Robin Hood system of, again, normalized greed.
I'm not completely denying legitimate supply-side issues that create rising prices. If sunflower seeds are more expensive because Putin invaded your fields, or if Chinese electronic components are harder to source because of Covid and increasingly protectionist & de-globalizing policies, then some degree of rising prices are inevitable. But we have to protect the vulnerable and raise the floor while de-incentivizing evil at the top. This is where Bezos and his tone-deaf “non-sequitur” tweet willfully ignores the connection between inflation and the need for wealth-redistributing taxes on ultrabillionaires like him who got rich by screwing everyone and everything in a quest to stoke infinite mindless demand for a race-to-the-bottom supply of goods we mostly don't need.
Our planet is obviously ruined by capitalism and the demand it creates. Insert Greta Thunberg chastising adults for their fairytales of eternal economic growth. Insert images from Wall-E of a planet buried under mountains of trash. As a bumper sticker in my neighborhood states: Capitalism Is A Death Cult. If we can only dream of canals re-clogged with container ships, we might instead frictionlessly order some 4.5 star pitchforks and stick all sorts of blame where it belongs: with an upper class that sells poison and hates us for buying it.