I’m a formerly-hardcore (now kinda softcore) leftist and it bothers me to no end when leftwing parties ignore the huge body of economic research/literature/educ

I’m a formerly-hardcore (now kinda softcore) leftist and it bothers me to no end when leftwing parties ignore the huge body of economic research/literature/education in market economies to try to push some agenda. A profit-price spiral makes no sense as a concept without widespread collusion. Let me phrase what they are observing in a way that is actually based in market economics: when the monetary supply increases without actual productive increases in supply (due to things like QE, dovish monetary policy, stimulus) it leads to inflation. Inflation in both wages and good/services prices is not uniform - if you gave every billionaire $100mm you would see different effects than if you gave every person $1k. What we’ve seen in a lot of economies is that inflation lately has shown up very quickly in consumer goods. You cannot necessarily increase the supply of consumer goods quickly - the supply is inelastic in the near term, especially since unemployment is low. As a business, if you are constantly running out of the supply of some good priced at $X it’s a pretty sure sign your prices are too low and you’re leaving money on the table - so business raise prices on those goods. And with very low unemployment rates, businesses cannot easily drive those profits into expanding their business because it’s hard to hire new people. Of course, these business have also had to pay employees more and pay more for the goods they sell. But if the market price increases outpace those increases you get profits, and with low unemployment, those profits have nowhere to go except shareholders (or maybe M&A). The businesses would not just pay their workers more because they don’t know what to do with their profits - the entire reason they started a for-profit business was for profit so it’s fairyland thinking that the money would go anywhere else.