Prices largely go up and down because of the law of suppy and demand. That's economics at its most basic level. There's much, much more to learn about economics but supply and demand are at the heart of the matter.
After 12 long years of free money for corporations pushed up the price of assets like stocks and houses, the Fed finally threw a bone to the rabble in the form of the stimulus checks. This caused the price of everyday things like food and gas to rise because that's what the bottom 50% largely spend their money on.
Prices don't rise because some CEO woke up one morning and said,"You know what? We don't have enough of those filthy profits progressives hate so much around here. Let's raise our price!"
If it was that easy, why didn't they raise them yesterday? Why wait for now? The answer is that they can only raise their prices if their customers will pay. If Coke raises its prices 20 cents higher than Pepsi, a lot of people will switch to Pepsi to save the 20 cents. And if coke raised prices to 4 dolalrs higher than pepsi everyone would switch. They can't just do whatever they want.
What happens to both Coke and Pepsi is that prices of things like gas for delivery trucks and aluminium for cans start to rise, so they are forced to raise their own prices to cover those costs or start losing money. And when Pepsi sees Coke go up a nickle, Pepsi knows they have room to jack their prices a nickle, too.
So the government passes out stimulus checks and people feel richer and buy more Coke than they otherwise would have. They've got an extra buck in their pockets so they spend it. That buck goes to Coke who spends more on gas and aluminium, which goes to the oil company and the mining company and they increase their production. This is normally a virtuous cycle that improves the wealth of the nation.
But the money for the stimulus checks did not come from taxes, it came from the Fed. The Fed simply typed some zeroes into their computer and financed the checks. They created the money from thin air. This is the ultimate source of the inflation.
Everyone instictively understands there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If the government can just make money from nothing and nobody had to produce a product or work for that money, then we're trying to make a free lunch. When the government gives that money to people so they can have a free lunch today it just pushes up the price of the next lunch tomorrow.
The solution to the inflation is to stop printing up free money, but nobody is going to agree to that, least of all progressives. We're eating the seedcorn and we can't stop ourselves. We are SO screwed.
