QUESTIONS ASKED: How bad is the current inflation and when will it abate?
I hate inflation, but there’s something delicious about the fact that this problem, above all others, is responsible for the low esteem in which voters currently hold Joe Biden and his party. Inflation is reality’s “F-you” to a central element of liberal hubris — the view that the government can do whatever the hell it wants by way of spending, energy policy, etc. and suffer no bad economic consequences.
Lyndon Johnson found that out as well, as Amity Shlaes wrote in her 2019 book, Great Society:
But an alarm that had only recently begun to ring told [voters] something was wrong and getting wronger by the day. The Consumer Price Index was rising 3 percent annually, significantly when compared with the old rate, which had hung somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent. The recent economic boom, as Senator Russell Long of Louisiana pointed out, was not always a boom for the “little fellow.” Inflation offset the gains of growth. The purchasing power of weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers had actually gone down in 1966 and 1967.15 Perhaps the money trouble signified not a general shortage but simply that the government had grown too large for itself.
And by 1968, Johnson found, Congress was ready to challenge the Administration on money. There was, said Senator Alan Bible of one of the old gold states, Nevada, a “growing mistrust of currencies, and when such mistrust exists, people of the world will turn to minerals of value, namely gold and silver.” From France, Charles de Gaulle kept up the mockery. In the United States, those away from government work were also frank. One economist in the private sector, a Wall Street forecaster named Alan Greenspan, revived the old, pre-Roosevelt point: a true gold standard was the only thing that could keep a government fiscally honest. Greenspan was a fan and friend of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. In The Objectivist, Rand’s periodical, Greenspan wrote that American overspending wasn’t strength or a wartime phenomenon; it was predictable. A welfare state, which was what the United States had become, always overcommitted. “The welfare statists,” Greenspan said, were always “quick to recognize that if they wished to retain power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e. they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds. . . . Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.” Another expert safely out of reach of Johnson, at the National Bureau of Economic Research, was Arthur Burns. Greenspan was just one economist; Burns, who headed the NBER, was the voice of the entire economics profession, independent and proud. Back in the 1950s, he had warned that “the problems of inflation will return to haunt us.” It had been Burns who back in 1960 had warned the presidential candidate Richard Nixon—correctly, as it turned out—that tight monetary policy at the Fed was slowing growth and could cost Nixon the election. Lately, Burns had been charging that Lyndon Johnson’s brand of prosperity featured serious “perils of inflation.” Burns, like Greenspan, pointed to the costs of the butter, not the guns. To attribute the recent large increases in the budget, and certainly future increases, to the costs of war, Burns said, frankly, was “a misconception.” The anti-poverty programs were the problem—a good share of them, as Burns told the New York Times, were “pure waste.” Precisely because they were outsiders, Greenspan and Burns could speak truth to power. Johnson was trading in the Great Dollar for the Great Society, and it was a lousy trade.
On the appropriate date of April 1st, the New Yorker asked, “Is Biden Really the Second Coming of FDR and LBJ?”
Add the above passage from Shlaes to the 2015 headline, “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate,” and Biden already seems a shoe-in to be the equal of both men!