The treasury is printing extra hundreds of dollars for every U.S. tax payer, so won’t that make inflation a lot worse? (I’ll take the money anyway.) :rolleyes:
They aren’t printing more money. They’re borrowing it, financed by bonds issued by the Treasury.
Which also has the effect of increasing the deficit, making the dollar weaker, and will contribute to rising interest rates. A weaker dollar makes imports such as oil more expensive (fueling inflation).
The recent dollar devaluation was another dumbass Bush administration move.
I wouldn’t call it a ‘Bush Administration Move’. It was the fed that lowered interest rates. That helped drive the dollar down. That’s having global repercussions - one worry is that other nations will have to lower interest rates as well, which will lead to global inflation. One estimate I just read was that the next few years could see global inflation rates as high as 7-8%.
I think the fed overreacted and lowered interest rates too much.
But it makes exports less expensive. When the dollar is strong, people bitch that we can’t export. When it’s weak, they bitch that we can’t import.
As Sam said, Bush doesn’t control the value of the dollar. He didn’t even control this rebate deal-- the Democratically controlled Congress passed it. Most of the folks in Washington were in favor of this move-- it passed with strong bipartisan support.
But that’s not going to stop people here from blaming Bush, right?
Too difficult to tell, at least from anyone without an advanced degree in Econ and ready availability to all pertinent financial data. I’ll guess and say not so much. I don’t remember (and I could be mis-remembering) much of a price bump during the last economic stimulus package, so therefore, I will forecast and say that there won’t be too much this time either.