{"id":9261,"date":"2022-11-09T15:28:10","date_gmt":"2022-11-09T15:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=9261"},"modified":"2022-11-09T15:28:10","modified_gmt":"2022-11-09T15:28:10","slug":"what-the-1970s-can-teach-us-about-todays-inflationary-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=9261","title":{"rendered":"What the 1970s Can Teach Us About Today&#8217;s Inflationary Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>\n\n&#8220;Critics, including some economists associated with the Democratic Party, warned that Biden&#8217;s determination to go big could set off an inflationary spiral. Among the most prominent of those critics was Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, who in February 2021 wrote in&nbsp;<em>The Washington Post&nbsp;<\/em>that &#8220;while there are enormous uncertainties, there is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Biden ignored Summers&#8217; call for a substantially smaller bill. The president flatly rejected a Republican counteroffer that would have cut the bill&#8217;s cost to about $600 billion in more narrowly targeted pandemic relief. He offered no substantial criticism of the idea; he simply objected that it was too small.There was no risk in overreach. The only danger was in doing too little.&#8221;<br>&#8230;<br>&#8221; Is America of 2022 simply repeating the mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s? It isn&#8217;t a note-for-note remake, but it does feel rather like a remix, a collage of historically familiar elements rearranged and repackaged in an updated aesthetic. If there is a lesson to be learned from the inflationary drama of the recent past, it is that inflation is to some degree a policy choice, made for political reasons. And thus, as with Reagan in the 1980s, it has both policy and political consequences.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-wordpress wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-reason-com\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"9dmw7VDKzA\"><a href=\"https:\/\/reason.com\/2022\/10\/13\/inflation-remixed\/\">What the 1970s Can Teach Us About Today&#8217;s Inflationary Politics<\/a><\/blockquote><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);\" title=\"&#8220;What the 1970s Can Teach Us About Today&#039;s Inflationary Politics&#8221; &#8212; Reason.com\" src=\"https:\/\/reason.com\/2022\/10\/13\/inflation-remixed\/embed\/#?secret=zuH8cROKan#?secret=9dmw7VDKzA\" data-secret=\"9dmw7VDKzA\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Critics, including some economists associated with the Democratic Party, warned that Biden&#8217;s determination to go big could set off an inflationary spiral. Among the most prominent of those critics was Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, who in February 2021 wrote in The Washington Post that &#8220;while there are enormous uncertainties, there is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.&#8221;<br \/>\nBiden ignored Summers&#8217; call for a substantially smaller bill. The president flatly rejected a Republican counteroffer that would have cut the bill&#8217;s cost to about $600 billion in more narrowly targeted pandemic relief. He offered no substantial criticism of the idea; he simply objected that it was too small.<\/p>\n<p>There was no risk in overreach. The only danger was in doing too little.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8221; Is America of 2022 simply repeating the mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s? It isn&#8217;t a note-for-note remake, but it does feel rather like a remix, a collage of historically familiar elements rearranged and repackaged in an updated aesthetic. If there is a lesson to be learned from the inflationary drama of the recent past, it is that inflation is to some degree a policy choice, made for political reasons. And thus, as with Reagan in the 1980s, it has both policy and political consequences.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[217,165,770,1316],"class_list":["post-9261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-economics","tag-economy","tag-history","tag-inflation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9262,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9261\/revisions\/9262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}