I fail to see what "people going back to work" has to do with inflation.
It's not specifically about people going to work, it's about routines and spending habits going back to normal, only to find themselves in a very different world.
Take gas for example. Once COVID hit everyone stopped driving so the demand for oil plummeted, and so did it's prices. Some refineries were actually paying businesses to take it off their hands. Think of what that does industry wide. Many of the places that refine and distribute oil were stuck with overhead they could no longer meet and had to close down. Then comes 2021 and people get back on the roads, but now with a significant portion of the supply chain wiped out we no longer have the ability to meet the global demand, so prices spike.
Same thing happened with computer chips. COVID created a massive spike in the demand for laptops and tablets, so manufacturers adapted by shifting it's resources from motor vehicle production. Then COVID ends and people are looking to buy new cars again but the supply chain had already been shifted towards computers, so new vehicle prices spike on top of the computer spike we already saw. And once prices go up, no one is going to bring them back down.
There were many other factors as well, but the point is that inflation had little to anything to do with Joe Biden's policies, nor is there anything Donald Trump could have done to stop it. This was a global issue brought on by a global pandemic, it's what Joe Biden inherited. Blaming him or propping up Trump as the answer to inflation is fundamentally dishonest.
It's still in poor taste for his supporters to brag about how great the economy supposedly is doing right now.
Why? It's politics 101. If Donald Trump was president right now we would never hear the end of how this is the greatest economy in the history of planet earth. Hell Trump is even trying to take credit for the stock market gains this year claiming it's because people think he's coming back. You don't get to talk about poor taste in bragging while supporting the most egregious braggart we've ever seen in American political life.
What this paints a picture of is a Biden economy where income rose faster than inflation for some, but not for marginalized groups.
I never said anything about marginalized groups. My AI generated response was about your claim that the left is just saying "believe us" with nothing to back it up when the data clearly shows that wages have gone up. Have wages kept up with inflation? No of course not, but that's been the case for decades now so it's no surprise. Have minorities and poorer Americans been left largely behind? Yes, but again, that's been going on for decades as well. And regardless of all of that, you certainly haven't provided any reason why Joe Biden should be held responsible for it or how Donald Trump will do anything about it.
when it came to discussions about the minimum wage 5 or so years ago, the left recognized how disastrous inflation has been for working class people. Now they're downplaying it since this discussion is inconvenient for their man in the White House.
But again, it's politics 101. The right is just as bad if not worse (and I would argue way worse).
Inflation is a very complex and nuanced subject so it's far easier to just blame whoever is in the White House than to explain to people all of the intricacies of how the economy works and how it has been impacted, plus people have a severely overinflated sense of just what the president can do so we'd be battling that misconception at a fundamental level. It just isn't smart politically to go down that road. People are ignorant so we have to play the game within the simplistic terms people will understand.
