After issuing all those columns by Paul Krugman about how there is no inflation, the New York Times has finally brought in Gail Collins to tell the truth. The editor emeritus of the paper’s opinion pages does so this morning in a marvelous column called “It’s only a million.”

“It’s sad what a million dollars has fallen to,” Ms. Collins begins. The comment was triggered by her discovery that when Jeb Bush left the governorship of Florida, he had net worth of “only,” as Ms. Collins put it, “$1.3 million.” She admits she was surprised. “He must have felt terrible at family gatherings.”

Imagine how the rest of us feel at the debasement of the dollar that Ms. Collin’s Nobel-prize-laureate colleague has been insisting is not being inflated. Ms. Collins is commiserating with the former Florida governor because of the paltriness of the million dollars a year he’s now making for advising Barclays Bank.

“A million dollars used to be a magic number, a sign of permanent affluence. You’d made it!” Ms. Collins exclaims. “But now it won’t buy you lunch with Warren Buffett.” The Sage of the Times notes that at a charity auction, lunch with the Sage of Omaha went for $1,000,100.

No doubt there will be a tendency to discount what Ms. Collins says. She didn’t intend her column to be about inflation, after all; she was swinging at Governor Bush. But the Times has run out not one but two columns by Mr. Krugman using the same, identical headline, “Not Enough Inflation.”

Professor Krugman has made it a practice to deride anyone who worries about the value of the dollar. He once mocked Congressman Paul Ryan for warning Chairman Ben Bernanke of the Fed that it was a terrible thing to “debase” the dollar. Mr. Krugman is the one with the Prix Nobel.

Well, Ms. Collins may not have been summoned to Stockholm (at least not yet — more on this in a moment). But she rose to glory via classical newspaper work covering local and state level politics (in her case Connecticut’s) before moving up to the national story. She’s got the same kind of common sense as Sarah Palin.

It was Governor Palin who, on the eve of the G-20 Summit in 2010, confronted Chairman Bernanke over the collapse of the dollar about which Ms. Collins has just written. Mrs. Palin focused not on Governor Jeb Bush’s consulting fees but on what Americans discover when they try to stretch at the grocery store the dollars issued by the Federal Reserve.

What Ms. Collins and Mrs. Palin are putting into sharp relief is the fact that the dollar has lost more than 98% of its value since the Federal Reserve. It was valued at a 20.67th of an ounce of gold back then. Today it is valued at less than a 1,200th of an ounce of gold. It has lost more than 34% of its value since President Obama was sworn to the presidency.

Ms. Collins views this through the prism of Marilyn Monroe’s famous movie “How to Marry a Millionaire.” That was in the 1950s, when, Ms. Collins wrotes, “nobody ever suggested that a million dollars would not be enough to keep a kept girl fed and sheltered.” Now, Ms. Collins points out, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers “spent $1.8 million just to buy his lady friend a duplex.”

“It’s not that money doesn’t buy happiness,” Ms. Collins writes. “It’s that these days it requires a whole lot more than a million dollars.” Well, none dare call it inflation, at least not at the Times. Maybe the Nobel Committee will rescind the prize it gave to Professor Krugman and give it to Ms. Collins. Professor Krugman won’t mind. The $1.2 million that comes with it isn’t worth what it used to be.