Trumpflation is Here
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Donald Trump loves to put his name on things, and when it comes to the recent burst of inflation, it’s totally deserved. Trump and Republican politicians are doing their best to try to make a simple story complicated. But there is no doubt that Trump is the lead and almost sole author of the inflation we are now seeing.
Just to quickly clear away the stupid: We did have a large burst of inflation under Biden, just like the rest of the world. We were hit with a worldwide pandemic in Trump’s first term, which he apparently can’t remember. The pandemic led to a massive fall in output in 2020, while Trump was president.
When Biden took office in January of 2021, we were still down more than 10 million jobs from the pre-pandemic level. Biden’s recovery package quickly got back the lost jobs and got the unemployment rate down to 4.0 percent by the end of the year, far faster than anyone expected.
The reopening of the economy from the pandemic recession led to a burst of inflation in the United States, as it did in Germany, France, and everywhere else. Suddenly people were buying lots of things, and it took a while for........
