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> Yes, the author is debating a straw man. No, the author is debating crazy people: > Unfortunately, the pandemic has permanently broken every economic chart

> Yes, the author is debating a straw man. No, the author is debating crazy people: > Unfortunately, the pandemic has permanently broken every economic chart in existence. > But if we take away the outlier 2020 data points, the average real annual GDP growth from 2010-2019 was 2.3%. The inflation rate in that time averaged roughly 1.8% per year. > If you’re one of the conspiracy people who believe inflation has actually been running at 5-6% per year, that would assume the economy has been contracting by 1-3% per year over the past 10 years. > And if you’re a full tinfoil hat person who assumes inflation is actually 10-12% per year[fn2], that’s like saying we’ve been in a full-blown depression and the economy has lost 80% of its value. > This is absurd and patently false but that’s the claim you’re making if you really think inflation is this high. [fn2] then points to a tweet: * https://twitter.com/tanayj/status/1345080274107785216?s=20 https://twitter.com/tanayj/status/1345080274107785216?s=20 Which has inflation at 10-12%, per: * https://chapwoodindex.com/ https://chapwoodindex.com/ The creator of this report is Ed Butowsky: * https://chapwoodindex.com/contact-us/ https://chapwoodindex.com/contact-us/ Butowsky is one of the people who put forward the idea that the DNC murdered Seth Rich for Hillary's Wikileaks e-mails: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Butowsky#Murder_of_Seth_Rich_conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Butowsky#Murder_of_Seth_Ric... If GDP was growth for the last decade was "only" ~2.5%, then how could have inflation been higher than that? It would have meant we were in a recession/depression.

TheTrotters 6y ago
Yeah, and the claim that inflation has been at 10-12% per year for the past 5 years is so ridiculous that it can be discarded without any analysis. If they claimed that inflation is, say, 3.5% instead of ~2% then we could look at their arguments. But to claim that it's at ~10-12% is a little like claiming that all our thermometers are faulty and it's actually 40 degrees Celsius outside. Complete detachment from reality.

TheTrotters 6y ago

Yeah, and the claim that inflation has been at 10-12% per year for the past 5 years is so ridiculous that it can be discarded without any analysis. If they claimed that inflation is, say, 3.5% instead of ~2% then we could look at their arguments. But to claim that it's at ~10-12% is a little like claiming that all our thermometers are faulty and it's actually 40 degrees Celsius outside. Complete detachment from reality.