The Gloom of Inflation

Americans are getting a lesson in economics — the hard way. That’s the upshot of today’s inflation report, at least according to the Associated Press. October’s 3.2 percent inflation is cheering the markets, which see the inflationary wave ebbing, and President Biden is crowing over the “progress” against inflation. Americans, though, are “gloomy,” the AP says, because “the costs of things they buy regularly” are “so much higher than they were three years ago.”It’s no wonder, despite the best efforts of the Democrats and their friends in the press corps, that but 14 percent of Americans “believe they are better off financially now,” as the Financial Times reports, than when Mr. Biden acceded to office. Mr. Biden is touting the fact that October’s pace of price increases — still in excess of the Fed’s 2 percent target — means “annual inflation is now down by 65 percent from the peak.”That’s cold comfort to consumers. Political strategist David Winston reckons that under Mr. Biden, “prices have increased cumulatively by 17.4 percent,” even as “hourly wages have increased only 13 percent.” Inflation on this scale hasn’t been seen since Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when, by this point in his tenure, prices soared 26.2 percent. By this point in the Trump years, Mr. Winston notes, prices had risen by but 5.6 percent. Today’s AP dispatch zeroes in on the fact that the price of staples of everyday life — “milk, meat, bread and other groceries” — soared during the Biden administration’s “transitory” inflation wave. Those prices, far from going down, are “still growing more expensive,” the AP says, “though more gradually.” This is why 82 percent of Americans, the FT reports, are pointing to “price increases” as “the source of their biggest financial stress.” “Gloomy” and stressed American consumers may prove to be the biggest hurdle to Mr. Biden’s re-election effort, the FT warns, noting how in 1980, “Ronald Reagan famously asked voters whether they were better off than four years earlier.” The fact that so many Americans answered in the negative paved the way for Reagan’s landslide win over President Carter. Then as now, voters were correct to pin the problem on the incumbent and his party.The instructive aspect of today’s inflation, put in the broadest terms, is that there’s no free lunch. Our Lawrence Kudlow has noted the “growing evidence by economists” that “sky-rocketing inflation” was triggered by “huge federal overspending.” Feature the $814 billion in Covid stimulus checks, followed by Mr. Biden and Congressional Democrats’ profligate Covid “relief” bill in March 2021, which inflated an economy that had already recovered.Such fiscal extravagance, far from increasing the wealth of Americans, merely precipitated a tsunami of inflation — what these columns have described as the “Illusion of Wealth.” What benefit might have been derived from those trillions of dollars artificially pumped into the economy for a short-term boost is now being canceled out by higher long-term prices for everyday goods and services. American consumers have every reason to be “gloomy.”

The Gloom of Inflation

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