When We Use a Word Like ‘Inflation,’ Do We Know What We’re Talking About?

At least once a day I hear Trump or one of the other GOP bullshit artists say something about how ‘inflation’ is still bad. And yes, there was a brief period in 2022 when both consumer prices and producer prices jumped above 10% on a year-to-year basis.

Consumer price increases have now gone back down to under 4%, but within the overall pricing structure there are still certain costs that remain stubbornly high, in particular housing and rent, which hits the less fortunate among us hardest.

At the same time, I am increasingly convinced that we are overly sensitive to the word ‘inflation,’ because everyone knows about the post World War I inflationary spiral which brought about the collapse of the Weimar Government in 1933 and the advent of the Hitler Fascist regime. And given that so much media blah-blah-blah has focused on determining whether or not Trump is a Fascist, it figures that a word like ‘inflation’ would become a touchstone for the current political debate.

The only problem is, actually there are two problems which somehow don’t seem to get addressed when the ‘inflation’ word is mentioned these days. First is the fact that today’s economy is totally different from the economy of either Germany or the United States when the issue of inflation first became a…