6 NEWS Controversy of the week
Inflation: A return to the economy of the 1970s?
Get ready for “the most expensive Thanksgiving
dinner in history,” said Alfredo Ortiz in
RealClearPolitics.com. Last week, the U.S.
Labor Department confirmed that runaway
price inflation is back and threatening to cast the
same dark shadow over the 2020s as it did the
1970s. Consumer prices have risen by 6.2 per-
cent since this time last year, the largest year-on-
year jump since 1990, with particularly pain-
inducing spikes in such vital commodities as
meat (up 14.5 percent), gasoline (up 50 percent),
and heating oil, which is up a staggering 59 per-
cent as we head into winter. President Biden did
his best to sound empathetic this week, calling rising prices “wor-
risome.” But he helped fuel the problem back in March—pumping
$1.9 trillion of Covid stimulus into an economy that was already
rebounding—and there isn’t much he can do now to put out the
fire. Nothing “destroys presidencies” like inflation, said Rich Lowry
in Politico.com. Next year’s midterms were already looking like a
bloodbath for Biden’s party, with his job approval rating sinking to
a new low of 41 percent. “Large-scale forces beyond Biden’s power
to fix” are driving prices up globally, but he and his aides didn’t
help matters by spending months insisting that inflation was “tran-
sitory.” Last week’s figures, sounding ominous echoes of the 1970s,
should be “a fire bell in the night for Democrats.”
“Don’t panic,” said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. The
present moment looks less like the 1970s than like 1947, when
the end of World War II triggered a massive surge in consumer
demand much like the one that’s snarling supply chains and driv-
ing up prices today. At that time, inflation peaked at 22 percent.
Then in 1948, prices dropped dramatically, as they likely will next
year when consumers run out of stimulus cash and Covid-shuttered
factories and warehouses fully reopen.That optimistic view looked more plausible
in the spring, said former Treasury Secretary
Lawrence Summers in The Washington
Post, but it’s “time for Team Transitory to
stand down.” Prices are rising across all sec-
tors of commodity goods, and when Biden
appoints a Fed chairman and several other
members of the central bank in early 2022,
“containing inflation” should be prior-
ity number one. Labor shortages present
another problem, said Yvonne Abraham
in BostonGlobe.com. Americans quit their jobs in record numbers
during the pandemic. This forced businesses to raise wages to woo
replacements, leading to higher prices for the goods those businesses
produce. If workers demand even higher wages to keep pace with
those higher prices, we’ll be in the “dreaded wage-price spiral” that
really did define the 1970s.Remember the big picture, said John Cassidy in NewYorker.com.
Inflation is occurring globally for the best of reasons: Governments
avoided the “all-out collapse” of their economies by directly putting
money into people’s pockets. Then vaccines arrived quickly, causing
consumer demand to rebound with unexpected speed. Uncertainties
remain, but as the pandemic recedes and people again spend money
on travel, entertainment, and other services instead of just goods,
the inflation outlook is “far from hopeless.” Biden’s fate depends on
it, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. If prices are still
rising when the midterm congressional elections arrive next year,
voters will be in a bad mood, and “Democrats will probably be
swept from office.” If inflation lasts into 2024, Biden is doomed to
join Jimmy Carter in the “one-termers’ club.”Only in America
QSome Americans who com-
plied with vaccination man-
dates are now seeking ways to
“undo” the shots. They’re us-
ing baking-soda baths, “cup-
ping,” and other methods to
“take nanotechnologies out of
you,” as anti-vaxxer Dr. Carrie
Medej puts it. Virologist
Dr. Angela Rasmussen said
none of the treatments work,
but the trend suggests “a lot
of those people who previ-
ously were saying ‘Vaccines
are terrible and I will never do
it’ are, actually, doing it.”
QA public library in Denton,
Texas, has canceled a “Rain-
bow Story Time” for children
over safety concerns. Library
director Jennifer Bekker said
the books read at the event
address accepting kids who
are different, with no specific
mention of sexuality or gender
identity, but a deluge of com-
plaints and threats “made us
concerned for public safety.”In other news
Infrastructure bill
signed into law
President Biden signed the
long-awaited $1.2 trillion
infrastructure bill in a White
House ceremony, calling it
“proof that despite the cynics,
Democrats and Republicans
can come together.” In a rare
bipartisan showing, some of
the 19 Republican senators and
13 GOP House members who
backed the bill attended the
signing event. Senate Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell voted
for the legislation but skipped
the signing. Former Presi-
dent Trump, who endorsed
infrastructure spending during
his term but never passed a
bill, has said Republicans who
voted for this bill should be
“ashamed of themselves”
for “helping the Democrats.”
Biden tapped former Demo-
cratic New Orleans Mayor
Mitch Landrieu to coordinate
the plan’s implementation and
minimize waste.Public health, with an Austrian brothel’s offer of free sex “with
a lady of your choice” to any customer who takes advantage of its
on-site Covid-19 vaccination center. “We have a great vaccination
site,” said the brothel’s owner.
Snowflakes, with the unveiling during Dubai’s Design Week fes-
tival of the Themis, a lamp-size device that monitors human speech
and sets off an “extremely annoying” alarm lasting two minutes if
it hears any “racist remarks” or “offensive jokes.”
Theocrats, after retired Gen. Michael Flynn, former President
Trump’s national security adviser, told a crowd on the far-right
Reawaken America Tour that “if we are going to have one nation
under God, which we must, we have to have one religion.” He
didn’t specify which one.Legal briefs, after a lawyer trying to enter a Philadelphia court-
room grew frustrated when the metal detector kept rejecting his sus-
penders, so he stripped down to his underwear. “I used poor judg-
ment,” Jeffrey Pollock said after being cited for disorderly conduct.
Air rage, after United Airlines announced it will resume sales of
hard liquor in economy class, despite the ongoing problem of cus-
tomers becoming violent when told they must wear masks.
Law and order, after Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel,
apologized for drinking so much at a recent Michigan–Michigan
State football game that she had to be escorted out of the stadium
in a wheelchair. The assisted exit was necessary, Nessel explained,
“so as to prevent me from vomiting on any of my constituents.”Good week for:
Bad week for:
GettyMeat prices are up 14.5 percent in a year.