When the recession comes, it will be interesting how it will be spun.
It will be, but it not that hard to guess the major themes, depending on who is in the driver seat when it hits.
How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
71–80 of 94 posts
Re: How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by 'the right job' and why would it 'force' people to leave their communities?
I'm going to change up the countries so there's less emotional value associated. Why should Polish people leave their country so they can find work in England? In theory, countries should be self-sufficient enough to where only niche based jobs should have such movement. I'm talking about highly specialized stuff. But when it comes to generic labor, why? Farming? Building houses? The fact people want to leave one cou…
No one has to do anything.
> The fact people want to leave one country for another just for basic jobs is kind of messed up.
Do they have to or do they want to? If they want to, what is the problem?
Economically countries are linked. You can say how these things 'should' be, but do you only buy food that was produced locally? You have to think about the incentives all the way through.
Re: How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it sad?
It's sad that food has to travel long distances to be purchased at reasonable prices when it's grown relatively nearby. To put the shoe on a different foot. The Dominican Republic produces a lot of tomatoes. But they lack a lot of the infrastructure and machinery that both the US and Mexico have. Shops there sell Mexico and US tomatoes when there's a tomato field ten or twenty miles away. Those fields truly can't com…
I agree, but that sounds like a case for a carbon tax, not for tariffs.
Re: How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
#74> At the same time, higher prices of garlic — they soared 53% — actually illustrate tariffs working as intended. > China had been the biggest exporter of garlic to the U.S. and domestic garlic growers have long argued they were being undercut by cheaper Chinese competition. Now that Chinese garlic faces higher tariffs, domestic companies can charge higher prices. Domestic companies being able to charge higher prices…
Why would garlic prices rise 53% if the tariffs are only 30%? Are there really no other factors at play?
Less competition or local producers not being able to make the desired quantities (at least right away) means prices can be higher.
Re: How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to change up the countries so there's less emotional value associated. Why should Polish people leave their country so they can find work in England? In theory, countries should be self-sufficient enough to where only niche based jobs should have such movement. I'm talking about highly specialized stuff. But when it comes to generic labor, why? Farming? Building houses? The fact people want to leave one cou…
No one has to do anything. > The fact people want to leave one country for another just for basic jobs is kind of messed up. Do they have to or do they want to? If they want to, what is the problem? Economically countries are linked. You can say how these things 'should' be, but do you only buy food that was produced locally? You have to think about the incentives all the way through.
In Punjab most of the time they Have to, because staying back means competition 1000sof Over Qualified applications for a peon job, whereas coming over to First World means being rich in few years.
Re: How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's sad that food has to travel long distances to be purchased at reasonable prices when it's grown relatively nearby. To put the shoe on a different foot. The Dominican Republic produces a lot of tomatoes. But they lack a lot of the infrastructure and machinery that both the US and Mexico have. Shops there sell Mexico and US tomatoes when there's a tomato field ten or twenty miles away. Those fields truly can't com…
Just because the tomato is coming from the Dominican Republic doesn’t mean more CO2 was produced. Farmer Jack driving a few hundred pounds of tomatoes to the farmer’s market might be spewing more CO2 per tomato than the hundreds of tons coming by ship from the Dominican Republic. Scale of efficiency definitely applies to transportation.
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Re: How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every bit of technological progress or economic optimization should result in naturally decreasing prices Not in dollar terms, especially when dollars are being deliverately managed so that the dollar cost of a labor hour increases over time. In terms of labor-hours, sure. > Lower consumer prices would help make up for the reduced demand for labor. No, lower nominal (dollar) prices would not. Lower real prices are…
> Not in dollar terms, especially when dollars are being deliverately managed so that the dollar cost of a labor hour increases over time. This is sophomoric relativism - achieving lower day-to-day prices is exactly how market competition works. It's tautological to justify a policy of changing the value of a dollar by rejecting analysis in terms of an unchanged dollar. When creating a new variable, you have to analy…
> achieving lower day-to-day prices is exactly how market competition works.
That's true, but irrelevant. You are using microlevel concepts on a macro level where they are by-definition cannot apply.
> It's tautological to justify a policy of changing the value of a dollar by rejecting analysis in terms of an unchanged dollar.
You can't have lower overall consumer prices against an unchanged dollar, because the definition of a constant or unchanged dollar is that it is corrected for price-level changes.
You can have lower nominal prices (deflation) which doesn't have the effects you attribute to lower prices at all, and you can have lower consumer prices relative to wages, which, as I've explained, do what you want if and only if the reduction in labor hours is spread evenly. Which there is little reason to think it would be absent direct regulation; what you'd normally expect is increased unemployment, because transaction costs of hiring scale with number employed, not hours worked, so it's usually more efficient for business to have fewer full-time (or even overtime) workers rather than more short-hours workers. Regulation can change this, of course, by reducing number of hours worked before additional overtime compensation is owed and increasing overtime premiums.
> An explicit goal of inflationary monetary policy is to drive "full employment". So yes, pushing everyone to keep working full time is one of its overt goals.
That's...not what “full employment” means. I know that some people like to point to the product of labor force participation rate times the employment rate and call it the real rate of employment, but that's not what policymakers consider employment to be or what they are targeting maximizing with “full employment”.
It's to stimulate a level of economic activity at which there is a labor demand such that all the labor that people want to sell is sold (which is full employment, because employment rate is people selling labor divided by people trying to sell labor) less transactional inefficiencies, it is not intended to increase real costs to force everyone into the labor force (which wouldn't actually support full-employment, but a higher labor-force participation rate.)
When you get to the point of articulating an idea that can be clearly understood, it seems to always be a misunderstanding caused by misinterpreting basic economic terminology.
Re: How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not in dollar terms, especially when dollars are being deliverately managed so that the dollar cost of a labor hour increases over time. This is sophomoric relativism - achieving lower day-to-day prices is exactly how market competition works. It's tautological to justify a policy of changing the value of a dollar by rejecting analysis in terms of an unchanged dollar. When creating a new variable, you have to analy…
> achieving lower day-to-day prices is exactly how market competition works. That's true, but irrelevant. You are using microlevel concepts on a macro level where they are by-definition cannot apply. > It's tautological to justify a policy of changing the value of a dollar by rejecting analysis in terms of an unchanged dollar. You can't have lower overall consumer prices against an unchanged dollar, because the defin…
Thank you for explaining how I am using terms incorrectly according to this model you are trying to constrain my analysis into. It's so much clearer now that I realize the concern I am describing simply cannot exist!
"It's just fundamentally dishonest to discard a political viewpoint by condescending from a paradigm that rules out said political viewpoint by construction."
(And we wonder why political polarization has gotten so extreme)
Re: How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Common sense is not a strong suit of this administration.
I don’t think the administration is deluded by that reality, but many of the supporters are. They just wanted jobs and Trump said yes, but he’s essentially misleading them.
"fed" is the word that is offensive. The notion that Trump supporters repeat lines that are fed to them like an actor on a stage, rather than analyzing different explanations and coming to a conclusion on which one was most accurate. Reinforced by "common sense easily precludes"
Re: How prices changed at a Walmart in a year
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely have seen Florida strawberries in Georgia. (Georgia also grows strawberries, although not that many.)
That's because you lot focus on peaches. Which, I mean, yea... Only good reason to risk getting a bs speeding ticket in Georgia is for a peach run.
North Carolinian here. SC peaches are superior to GA peaches.