I got mad, I think okidoki is a pretty fair response to me getting mad.
But Japan kept its workforce employed as everyone was down to wear masks like straight up. They pushed fiscal stimulus super hard, low inflation. I'm guessing they don't import a lot of their cheap manufacturing compared to us. They definitely didn't lose a lot of production like we did shutting down.
UK had a somewhat similiar covid response to ours, but on the back of Brexit (super inflationary) and being more trade dependent, have worse inflation than we do by a lot.
The USA is super dependent on trade for dollar store items. Trade with China. Our macroeconomic policies had no effect on Chinese covid policies, which were the biggest single foundational driver of inflation. "Corporate greed", as if that ever changes, accounted for more, which was made possible by Chinese covid policies and their temporary monopolies. That's not demand driven, that's just microeconomics in action. Our spending was inflationary but dollar store goods were going to cost more no matter what. And those goods are doubly vulnerable. If there's inflation, people will want to cut costs, but they'll still buy what they need, so everyone's piling in at the dollar store, which is already facing a shortage from something way outside our control. Literally the number of container ships worldwide plummeted as many were turned into scrap. Oil got so cheap they paid you to buy it, remember? You just had to warehouse it. The price of cardboard went way up. None of this is "Congress spent too much."
You could argue that spending at the bottom helped buy out the rest of the stock of goods driving up prices. Which will be partially true but nowhere close to explain why dollar store prices are up, as I alreadt covered why. Nor does it items are behind glass (a growing trend pre-covid). It's a nonstarter of an argument because you would be arguing that people are poorer because they are richer. That means they aren't poorer, at least not from the being richer part. People aren't shoplifting because they got more money so prices are higher. People are shoplifting because prices are higher, and they don't got more money, at least not most of them.
So to highlight, when I said "Magical Thinking", it's that these very real exogenous covid/trade drivers of higher prices in the macro had nothing to do with what Congress did. And the mass microeconomic monopoly pricing changes making for a macro price rise was literal 101 market forces, not Congress. To give so much agency to even the American government here is assigning them magic powers.
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