Here’s something new to blame inflation on other than Joe Biden and the Democrats’ policies: climate change!

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/02/02/the-atlantic-forget-president-biden-climate-change-is-causing-inflation/

The Atlantic magazine tries to explain that reasoning, which I’m not even going to bother to recap. Click the link if you want to read it, but here’s a sample quote to show what it's worth: “The surge in dollars can’t explain why gas prices are so high.” Actually, it can. That, plus the fact that immediately upon taking office, Biden launched a war on domestic fossil fuel production, destroying our energy independence and once again reducing us to having to beg OPEC to pump more oil.

But I will toss them one bone: the rampant inflation (which is actually much higher than what’s reflected by the finessed government CPI numbers) has its roots in policies that have been going on since long before Biden took office. This is the result of a long series of terrible decisions by Presidents, Congress and the Federal Reserve. For decades, we’ve been running up debt, printing money, letting the Fed buy up debt, bailing out banks that made bad decisions, running up trade deficits, losing our manufacturing base, paying people to be unproductive, and keeping interest rates ridiculously low to keep the bubble inflated. Now, all those bad decisions are coming to a head.

When President Reagan took office, he faced a similar situation. He and Fed Chair Paul Volker bit the bullet and raised interest rates. The prime rate reached 21.5% and the economy went into recession. The Democrats blamed Reagan to their political advantage. But Reagan knew it was necessary to end stagflation, and it worked: inflation fell from 14.8% to below 3%, setting the stage for the boom of the ‘80s. As Reason used to point out, “You’ll notice they don’t call it ‘Reaganomics’ anymore now that it’s working.”

But politicians like Reagan who are willing to put the good of the nation above their immediate political fortunes are few and far between these days. Now the Fed talks about raising interest rates by a fraction of a point, and the stock market drops by a thousand points. Raising interest rates would mean all of our taxes would go to paying the interest on the massive debt we’ve run up (which just topped $30 trillion this week, not that many media outlets remarked on it.)

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/592362-us-national-debt-tops-30-trillion

We’re left with no easy solutions and precious few hard ones. The one thing you’d think Washington could do is recognize the huge hole we’re in and stop digging. Unfortunately, Biden and the Democrats in Congress want to deal with that hole by printing even more money, buying a steam shovel with it, and digging the hole even deeper (they’ll call it an “infrastructure” project.)

For that, they do deserve blame for the current rising inflation numbers. They lit the fire long ago, it’s smoldered for a long time as nobody did anything about it, and now they’re pouring $4-a-gallon gasoline on it.