National Review Online
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
The Consumer Price Index increased by 1.2
percent in March, the quickest month-over-month increase in more than 15 years,
and the year-over-year inflation rate is now at 8.5 percent, the highest since
December 1981.
The White House has coined a new proper noun to describe
inflation: “Putin’s Price Hike.” Written with capital letters to start each
word in all official communications, the term was initially used to describe
the increase in gas prices.
In a disgraceful smear, White House communications
adviser Jesse Lee tweeted that
Vladimir Putin and Senator Rick Scott (R., Fla.) are “in lockstep in blaming
Biden for Putin’s Price Hike.” Scott had told a reporter that “today’s CPI
numbers should be a big wakeup call for Joe Biden, but we know nothing will
change” — a pretty anodyne, not to say correct, comment.
Being concerned about inflation does not connote sympathy
with the Russian dictator, and the White House is going to be in for a surprise
if it actually believes that it does. Polling shows Americans are overwhelmingly anti-Putin
while being very
concerned about inflation. Then again, this wouldn’t be the first time
this White House is surprised by what the American people actually think.
People understand this much, and they understand it well:
Things they normally buy are noticeably more expensive than they were not that
long ago. That uptick in prices began before the invasion of Ukraine. It’s
going to be a tough sell to blame all of it on the Russian dictator.
The first and more deserving target for criticism is the
Federal Reserve, which seems to be behind the curve, as has often been the case
in its history. Even if the Fed hits its inflation target for every month for
the rest of the year (which it certainly won’t), inflation
for 2022 will still be at 5 percent, about 3 percentage points higher than
the Fed wants it to be.
The Fed has waited so long to raise interest rates and
stop bond buying that bringing inflation back under control could jeopardize
the recovery. Deutsche Bank last week became the first major bank to
forecast a recession for 2023, and the economists who wrote the report said
they think other banks will follow soon.
Despite talking tougher and retiring the word
“transitory,” the Fed’s view, based on its
economic projections, still seems to be that inflation will largely cool
off on its own, and only modest rate hikes are needed to bring it back under
control. There is some logic to that idea, but count us as skeptical
of the Fed’s predictions given its track record.
The Fed is finally out of emergency mode, almost two
years after the pandemic recession officially ended in May 2020 and after the
sharpest increase in the money supply in the Federal Reserve era. It needs to
rebuild its credibility by providing more clarity about its goals — which
should mean raising interest rates as much as needed to bring total spending
levels back to the trend it was on before Covid and the last year of inflation.
While it’s not the primary culprit, there are things the
Biden administration could do to help. The Center for a Responsible Federal
Budget estimated in March that ongoing Covid-relief policies are contributing
as much as 0.68
percentage points to the inflation rate. Those policies include
increased payments to Medicare providers, increased Medicaid aid to states, and
the student-loan payment pause.
Like the Fed, the administration is clinging to emergency
policies long after the emergency is over. Covid is a treatable illness now
(thank you, Big Pharma!), and unemployment is extremely low. There’s no
justification for these policies to continue, and though their overall effect
isn’t huge, they are adding inflationary pressure.
Ending Covid-relief measures would also address another
potential driver of inflation: reckless federal deficit spending. If
bondholders can’t be paid back because Congress has no fiscal discipline, the
Fed will have to print more money to pay them. That would happen in the future,
but those expectations can affect inflation in the present. Signaling that
Congress intends to get its act together and stop running massive deficits
during an economic expansion would go a long way in reassuring bondholders that
the dollar will be a reliable store of value decades into the future.
Our ballooning government debt, accumulated by presidents
of both parties who haven’t cared about balanced budgets for years, makes the
Federal Reserve’s job harder as well. Raising interest rates to counteract
inflation is much harder to do when interest on the debt is a major federal
expenditure. If our politicians keep spending our money as irresponsibly as
they have in the past 15 years, this won’t be the last bout of inflation we
see.
The Biden administration may want to look abroad for
scapegoats on inflation, and Putin’s war certainly isn’t helping the energy
market. But there are plenty of culprits right here at home. The Fed must do
its job, and Congress and the president must commit to more fiscally
responsible spending plans. Fundamentally, the fault is not in the Ukraine war,
but in ourselves.
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