And contrary to what some are trying to spin, the increases are not only used cars and hotel rooms, though that could be bad enough. Food prices, gas prices, home energy prices, and other things used on a daily basis by American citizens are skyrocketing.
That has left Democrats in a very weird place, as proven by Nancy Pelosi’s during her recent interview in which she attempted to make the case that inflation was really a good thing.
According to her, the current boom in inflation is positive because it means that Americans have jobs. Of course, anyone that has been alive for longer than the past year is well aware of how crazy that is. When we were at almost full employment and the economy was going along under Donald Trump, inflation stayed at normal levels. Even during Obama’s tenure, when the nation saw big jobs growth getting out of the Great Recession, we did not see inflation anywhere near the amounts we are seeing now. So to say people having jobs is linked to inflation is crazy.
We can further argue against Pelosi’s commentary, though. If you take a look at the jobs market, while we have made stronger gains (mostly because of red states not going along with Joe Biden) over the past two years in making up lost ground because of the COVID-19 lockdowns, we are only now getting to 2019 levels of employment. What was the inflation number in 2019? It was 1.81 percent.
Yet, according to Nancy Pelosi, people having jobs is the top driver of inflation right now. How can that be when the same amount of jobs in 2019 gave 1.8 percent compared to the 7.5 percent happening in 2022? The answer is that even with Pelosi’s fallacious claims, employment levels are not the top driver for inflation. Clearly, it is government spending.
