▪️It’s remarkable how many conflate the inflation rate with prices (at least when it suits their politics). If the inflation rate rises to the highest in 4 decades, like it did in 2022, then falls to 3.7% over the next 14 months, prices are still much higher than when the rate peaked at over 9%, they haven’t come down.
▪️An easy way to see this is to look at a graph of the actual consumer price index (not the rate of increase). This is more in line with what people actually experience (no one goes to the store thinking about rates of increase) and you can see prices continue to climb climb climb. I’ll post a chart of this in the comments.
▪️The same holds for the “core” rate which is still at 4.1%, more than double the Fed’s target. Even with a huge increase in interest rates, pushing mortgages to 8%, the core is still more than double their goal, and the recent trend is not decreasing but staying steady at 4%. Some might consider that not a success.
It’s funny to see the left use the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the right did a year ago regarding the jobs numbers being downwardly revised. So many on the right, who knew nothing of how the jobs numbers are calculated or why they revise them, were convinced the downward revisions were a conspiracy to help Biden win.
If people want to have a debate about the birth death model or the survey methods, ok, but that’s not what’s happening here. Most people are under the delusion that the BLS report is the govt reporting every job created and lost, and are thus easily swayed it’s rigged when it suits their political ends.
This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 ...
