JEFF GREENFIELD: Joe Biden’s Empty Inflation Toolbox.

Inflation has a unique power to kneecap a presidency. Incumbent presidents and their parties do not do well at all when inflation (and attempts to cure it) are on voters’ minds come election time. The gas pump, the supermarket check-out counter, the heating bill, the sticker on the windshield, provide — or seem to provide — powerful indictments against the party in charge.

If that’s not enough to unsettle the White House and its allies, consider this: Presidents have almost no power to ease the pain of inflation, and the voting public cuts presidents no slack at all because of that impotence.

Tell that to Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker, who understood exactly how to wring inflation out of the economy — and did. They engineered a punishing recession in 1981, putting Reagan’s reelection at risk, but certain that there would be a resulting boom.

The difference today is that nobody has the political will to risk their comfy positions to do what needs to be done.