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Who’ll tame inflation?

By Joe O’Neill - Amherst | Oct 29, 2022

Inflation is on everyone’s mind as we go to the polls – Republicans are pushing the (unfounded) lie that it’s all Joe Biden’s fault, and if you vote Republican, everything will be fixed! Nothing could be further from the truth. What will the Republican do to solve inflation? NOTHING – NADA – ZILCH. As a matter of fact, if Republicans re-take the US Congress, their planned agenda will make inflation WORSE.

Yes, inflation is at its highest level in 4 decades, it’s squeezing people, especially lower income folks. The acknowledged reasons for recent high inflation include the supply chain, the pandemic, and war in Ukraine. There’s also a new culprit: corporations are doing quite well – compared to pre-pandemic levels, corporate profits have never been higher. Recent corporate profits are averaging 17%, whereas historically they never topped 13%. Whether you call it price gouging, corporate greed or just business as usual, when corporations can raise prices without hurting their profit margins, they will.

Market forces drive inflation; market forces will eventually contain it. Whichever party is out of power always blames the other side for it, and makes it the #1 election issue.

If Republicans re-take Congress, they plan to shut down the government until they cut social security and Medicare. They also plan to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the net effect of that move would be to raise drug prices, raise health insurance premiums, and cripple the IRS’ efforts to go after high earner tax cheats and large corporations. How’s that for not taming inflation?

The recently passed IRA is one example of how Democrats are actually doing something to reduce inflation. Other ongoing Democratic efforts include: increasing the oil supply to reduce gas prices, lowering food prices by boosting US farm and meat production, lowering school lunch costs, and working to solve supply-chain disruptions by improving supply-chain resilience and boosting domestic chip manufacturing.

You will be sadly mistaken if you buy the Republican lie that they will tame inflation. Instead, vote for Chris Pappas, Annie Kuster, and Maggie Hassan so they can continue their fight to actually tame inflation.

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