Comment on US Federal Reserve raises interest rates for the first time since 2023
pmtriste@lemmy.world 12 hours agoOh, maybe I should address your comment from your perspective. I imagine what you’re suggesting is that microeconomically taxing the poor would combat inflation because they would have less money to spend. For one, I was speaking macroeconomically, not microeconomically. Speaking from a microeconomic perspective, if you’re assuming that supply is inelastic and demand is elastic, then lowering demand (by lowering the amount of free cash of people spending it) makes sense, except that the poor aren’t primarily spending money discretionarily. They spend money because they have to in order to survive. So decreasing their money doesn’t actually help to reduce their spending, because that demand is inelastic. You have to tax people who are making discretionary spending choices. From a “percentage of spending spent on discretionary purchases perspective”, you’re still taxing the rich, because at this point even the middle class is struggling.
iopq@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Of course it would reduce demand, poor people would just skip meals. Just because it’s not discretionary doesn’t mean they would still spend the money they don’t have
This has been found multiple times, giving money to poor people boosts spending more than giving it to rich people. So if you want to cut spending, doesn’t it follow you take it away from poor people? You can’t have it both ways