It's also vastly easier for the Fed to adjust interest rates than for Congress to adjust taxes.

Hell, it took them weeks to elect a speaker, could you imagine a debate over taxes!

That would of cause target the rich more

Though we should definitely raise taxes on the top 3 quintiles for a wide variety of reasons, your statement here is specifically why raising taxes to fight inflation doesn't really work.

The vast majority of consumer spending is non-discretionary

Some of my worst grades were in Econ class because it’s really hard for me to get beyond the fact that the answers to Econ questions always have an asterisk at the end since we don’t know what the future will hold.

It’s like, yeah we say “all things equal” something should happen in a certain way. And in the vacuum of a classroom maybe that’s OK. But it’s really all just educated guesses. And really that’s the best that we can do, and maybe that’s just fine. But when I hear stuff like “economists predict [x]…” I kinda roll my eyes.

When consumer spending is very high, inflation continues to rise because there is not an increase in supply. (Consumers are spending more to effectively get almost the same amount of things as before).

This is, obviously, bad if unchecked.

The Federal Reserve is like a cat that can't make up its mind about whether it wants to be inside or outside.

Since the article is quoting some of the top economists in the world, I would t let not being one really limit your options for commenting.

Here’smy hot take: economists have discussed sticky prices and sticky wages - which is a (imho) crappy way of describing effectively friction in economics. I wonder if what we are seeing here is sticky consumer spending. Normally we’d expect spending to react most quickly to interest rates and inflation, but people have gotten used to a certain level of spending and escalating debt, and so they might simply feel (or need to feel) unaffected by the fed changes.

Honestly, until we update the idea of an economic rational actor, I don’t think we’re going to get very far. In fact I think we risk getting further afield the longer we persist, and the more difficult it will finally be to realign everything.

Another possibility is lingering effects of boomers taking COVID as a sign to retire, creating a labor shortage and putting pressure on companies not to have a layoff because they are worried they might have trouble re-hiring folks when the economy cools off

This is so rarely brought up and is such a massive fucking deal that it's criminal not to discuss it.

It’s a very strong economy just not for the bottom 90% of people.