Madam Pelosi Didn’t Get the Memo

More people working is unambiguously good for America, and more people working never causes inflation. Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods.

Rod Lamkey/pool via AP
Speaker Pelosi at the Capitol, January 20, 2022. Rod Lamkey/pool via AP

Save America. Kill Inflation.

Why? Because the 7.5 percent inflation tax is destroying working people’s pocketbooks and devaluing the wages they earn.

The root cause of this inflation is way too much government spending, too many social programs without workfare, and vastly too much money creation by the Federal Reserve. 

This isn’t difficult. It’s just common sense, and of those three factors — too much spending, too many incentives to avoid working and producing, and too much money creation — that point about the Fed is probably the biggest of all. 

Speaking of inflation, we had an interesting analysis this weekend from the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. During one of the Sunday shows, she said skyrocketing inflation is due to more people entering the workforce. 

“The fact that people have jobs always contributes to an increase in inflation. And that’s a good thing,” Ms. Pelosi said, “but inflation is not good, you know, we have to contain it.”

Really?

Madam Speaker, you can’t have it both ways. Either you blame working people or you don’t. Some big liberal on your staff probably told you there is a Phillips curve tradeoff between high inflation and low unemployment. That person misled you, and confused you.

More people working is unambiguously good for America, and more people working never causes inflation. Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. With more people working, it means more people are producing goods.

That’s the supply side of the economy, and more goods chasing the same amount of money would reduce prices, and lower inflation. Right now, working people are demanding higher wages because they’re trying to keep up with higher prices — it’s a price-wage spiral — and who can blame them?

Later, Ms. Pelosi said that one of President Biden’s great accomplishments is the rescue package from last April that has put money in people’s pockets. Now, that’s not an achievement, it was a failure. It caused high inflation because it created too much demand.

Even worse, because it was government income without work requirements, it created more demand and less supply at the same time, and that is in fact one of the principal causes of the raging inflation we have now.

So, I’ll repeat: Wanna solve inflation? Pause spending, reform welfare, and curtail the Fed’s money supply. This, by the way, was the key part of a memo that a very brilliant former senator, Phil Gramm, recently sent to a bunch of his friends in the House and Senate.  

I don’t think Madam Speaker got the memo.

________

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.


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