MATTHEW YGLESIAS: Greedflation is still fake.

David Sirota roped me into a piece he wrote last week, the thesis of which is that “after corporate media lied America into a war and a financial crisis, data show they lied about a main source of price hikes — and brutal policies followed.”

My alleged sin was the May 2022 article “Greedflation is fake” about takes like this one from Public Citizen, which appeared to be arguing that inflation was caused by some kind of exogenous increase in corporate greed. . . .

But my point in the greedflation piece was twofold:

Greed is a constant in the economy, not a variable, and it doesn’t explain why inflation was so much higher in 2022 than in 2019.

Price controls and rationing are a reasonable response to certain kinds of supply disruptions associated with war or natural disaster, but if you use them to address run-of-the-mill excess of demand you end up with shortages.

Sirota’s new piece completely ignores the text of what I actually wrote, and instead goes to town on the idea that a large share of the increase in prices is accounted for by an increase in profits. This supposedly proves that I am part of a cabal of media liars whose “inflation myth crushed the working class.”

This is nonsense.

The whole point is that overstimulating the economy generates price increases and windfall profits, which is why ideally you wouldn’t overstimulate the economy.

They have to blame someone or something other than their own greedy policies. Corporate greed may not have gotten significantly worse, but in the past few years our political class has shed all restraint.