10 thoughts on “Ron Klain”

  1. Well, he’s right; we all know that the wealthy are the ones least able to afford it when when food and other necessities become scarce and expensive. The reason is simple; because the poor have a lot more money than the wealthy.

    What I just said above makes ever bit as much sense as this and other blather emitting from the White House.

  2. I think what Mr. Klain is saying is not that inflation and scarcity is only a problem for the wealthy, who are less wealthy by those factors and if you are poor, high prices and scarcity is not a problem because you don’t have any money to begin with to buy anything, whatever its price or availability, were that reasoning to make any sense at all.

    I think he is agreeing with some guy at the U that the problem of inflation and scarcity is what is “high class”, not the people affected by it. It is kind of like saying “inflation and scarcity are a good problem to have” because it means that unemployment is low, although I hear labor-force participation is low too.

    “High class” is a poor choice of words because it usually refers to a narrow group of people rather than an abstract economic condition affecting all people. Good word choice is supposed to be in the skill set of professors at the U, but maybe econ PhD’s didn’t have to take that writing class we require of engineers?

    At least he is not saying that inflation and scarcity are Mr. Trump’s problem, because blaming your predecessor gets old very quickly. Mr. Klain is much too politically sophisticated to do anything like that.

    Aren’t you, Mr. Klain?

  3. Inflation absolutely destroys any static “saved” wealth. Think of all the pensioners in Russia who went from poor to wretched in a few years. But then, you could say that the “Poor can’t get any ‘Poorer’ — other than starving, of course!”

    1. So if you define “high class ” as “anyone who has savings ” then he’s right. Except most of us would consider those people “middle class who’ve worked hard and saved.”

      1. You both got it right and now we know when they say tax the rich, they mean the middle class. A larger tax burden plus devaluation of retirement accounts that they also want to tax and nationalize really screws over our responsible upstanding citizens, especially if they die and the gov steals the inheritance.

  4. Obviously we need to pass that 3.5 trillion dollar spending bill to avoid further inflation and shortages down the road.

  6. On Jason Furman’s original tweet (which as noted is kind of a “it could be worse” optimism that we’re having inflation instead of high unemployment), the 1970s showed that you can have both inflation and high unemployment – stagflation. We may be seeing a repeat of that now with a significant portion of the population choosing not to work due to covid. It seems bizarre to speak of a rule of thumb that’s already been broken in similar circumstances.

    Glancing at labor force participation, I see a sharp 1.5-2% drop in participation since the covid epidemic started. Given employment is crudely 61% of total population, that would be in the usual unemployment terms, a 2-3% increase in unemployment rate, if they were all to seek employment or at least draw unemployment insurance. And of course, inflation is somewhere around 5% currently. So looks to me like we’re already seeing a bit of stagflation.

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