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> At the same time, personal savings rate is through the roof:

Yes, people that can afford to save are saving more. The people that can't afford to save are still not saving, but the people who had a surplus now have a bigger one.

> People have received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks.

No, people have (per person) received a maximum of either $500 (to their parent, for children under 17) or $1,200 (for adults) in stimulus checks.

> Thanks to extra $600/$300 that the feds have added to federal unemployment, those that lost their jobs received in many cases significantly more that they were originally making

Yes, when the $600 boost was active, that was true mostly for people making below the average state minimum wage because they live in low-CoL, low-minimum-wage states, because the additional amount was designed to move the average unemployment check nationally approximately up to full replacement. That’s true of even fewer people with the $300 boost which replaced it months ago.

> No, shoplifting is not increasing because people lack cash. Rather, people do it because they can, as the justice system declines to prosecute and punish people for it.

If people had equal or better ability to afford food but were just taking advantage of a law enforcement withdrawal to shoplift more food, you’d expect surveys of food insecurity, charity food lines, and other indicia of actual hunger to be unmoved and the food shoplifting to stand alone. And you would not have expected a spike when the $600 unemployment boost ended, since available money is not the issue. But those expectations would all be wrong, suggesting that money actually is the issue:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/25/long-food-lines-signal-need-...

So you're saying that even though people have a ton of money in the bank, they are going to grocery stores to steal food?

If they were stealing clothes or laptops, your argument makes sense. People with money in the bank do not steal food.

The stimulus stopped, and a lot of unemployed people have blown through their savings by now.

Aggregate measures are not individual measures.

The appropriate statistics aren't savings rate, but poverty rate, unemployment, workforce participation, evictions (mostly though not all ilegal or undocumented presently), and similar indicia of how many people and families are living beneath sustainable fundamental minima.

If there's clearly a problem yet your indicator, diagnostics, or data don't indicate a problem, the failure isn't reality, the failure is your indicator.

Rising poverty + rising savings rate -> rising net inequality QED

Savings rate is a function of income. What if your income is zero because you've lost your job due to a pandemic?

If incomes were going down, you’d expect decrease, not increase in savings rate.

If someone makes no income, they're not counted in the savings rate is my point. It's like people who do not look for work not being counted as "unemployed"

Second link is through 2Q20. Long time ago. Good points though