The American minimum-wage issue.

FAST6191 said:

I don't think money printing was caused by minimum wage increases. Money printing has been going on for a while now
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That said I do generally find myself on the "the real minium wage is zero" side of the debate when it comes to the minimum wage discussions.

As far as money printing = inflation then while I am more likely to have a nice civil chat with an Austrian than a Keynesian I generally attribute it a bit more complexity than that.

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FAST6191 said:

You don't need to print money to offset wage increases. You could probably raise it to $1000 an hour without bothering anything too much as far as money in circulation being able to be used to divide down small enough without running out. Or indeed you no more have to print money to offset wage increases than you do when someone has a good harvest that year and makes more apples than would normally have been in circulation -- in an ideal world money would only be printed to replace broken stuff (possibly not even that) and when it was not divisible enough; splitting $1000 a million ways is not great when some want to buy one of those apples above and someone else wants to buy an entire subdivision of a city to rent out.

Classically, under the Austrian economics school of thought, then inflation is money printing. If you print money you have necessarily inflated the supply. More modern stuff will tend to abstract it a bit and do CPI (consumer price index), though that is not without its controversies as they do fiddle with the calculations to make things look better (turns out having the people you yell at for screwing things up also be the ones to investigate themselves is more dubious -- one main example being the price index aims to measure consumer goods prices, so you buy a fancy toothpaste one year and go back to get the same amount year on year, however one year it goes up a lot which is not good for your masters so you instead substitute for the bottom shelf cheap stuff and call it good, another is cost of housing a wild estimate based upon those that rent their houses out rather than an actual sample)ー. Toothpaste is not the best metric as someone might come up with a better formula -- food costs per calorie since modern agricultural science has dropped like a stone (fertiliser and pesticides and robot tractors are good stuff it seems).

Inflation is targetted by the government because if it was deflation then nobody would spend more than the bare minimum and save everything they could (just as inflation makes your money more and more worthless as time goes on then the reverse would be true and living in a tent today would mean a mansion some time in the future). The US one also does not have pay things linked to inflation (if their bonds pay say 2% and inflation is 4% then in real terms you are losing 2% per year, though that is better than a bad year in the stock market ー with that having everything in the main US stock market so far this year), the UK and some other places do have inflation linked bonds though.

Why money printer go brr is a more complicated topic. Originally there was a gold standard (not that gold is all that useful) and things were fixed/related to how much gold you had/can dig out of the ground (a fairly fixed amount really, though historically there are interesting quirks like Spanish silver crash and Mansa Musa). That was lost (ー and as people still wanted dollars (stable currency, more so than most of the world, oil is priced in it, biggest consumer market out there) then it became the reserve currency of the world that people use in place of other things (nobody uses Thai Baht around here, everybody has dealings with the US so is happy to take them instead even if neither party is involved at that point). As you don't have to cough up gold or borrow it from someone else (they will want it back, with interest) though then you can think "hmm, let's just print a bit more rather than actually earning it from selling/taxes/fines/whatever", and so the US government did. It all eventually filters down into prices, usually after the little guy gets shafted (rich people have money in inflation hedges, or might just move first) and as a bonus inflation is a stealth tax increase as well as no government increases the tax limits in accordance with inflation.ー or if you prefer according to that $20,962.12 in 2022 has the same purchasing power as $17400 in 2012, 17400 being the first tax bracket in 2012 where today it is $19900 or they effectively dropped the bracket by $1000 over 10 years despite theoretically increasing it (and that is just using official CPI, which as covered above is dubious at best).

Video if you want
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