Issue 2 • 2022 11 INFLATION: A DEEPER LOOK AT A CONTINUING PROBLEM Iwrote a bit about inflation this year, as it was a burgeoning problem beginning to pick up steam in the national dialogue, but now might be an appropriate time to return to the topic. Inflation has now become the topic du jour in national economic discourse, with pundits both expressing the need to bring it down and searching for the possible instigators. Let’s examine how the topic has continued to evolve in recent months, inflation’s origins and effects, and also how instructive it is to study the way it is discussed in much of our media. A theme that often emerges when paying attention to American media discourse is blame obfuscation. Problems don’t emerge from thin air, they’re caused by specific courses of action and discreet decisions often made by powerful interests, but much of our media discourse seems to exist to muddy this fact. A quick examination of the recent discourse around inflation shows how much of it is meant to leave the viewer or reader in a state of befuddlement rather than enlightenment. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that one of the overriding missions of our media, whether conscious or unconscious, is to take problems that have real, tangible origins and to declare that the origins of such problems are impenetrably complicated and not even worth delving into for fear of getting lost in complex minutiae. In reality, this posture of impenetrable complexity belies the fact that our media doesn’t want to find out the answers, so shrouding everything in a web of mysticism and opacity serves a purpose. Notably, prominent economic figures such as former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and current Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell have stated recently that they believe the quickest way to curb inflation is to raise unemployment by nearly 2%, meaning approximately 10 million Americans would lose jobs. If you’ll recall, the talk in elite economic circles only a year ago was that nobody wanted to work anymore and filling low-wage jobs was becoming an impossibility. Now, those same economists are casually suggesting kicking millions of Americans out of their current jobs. If you notice a pattern, it’s that workers are to be manipulated like puppets depending on what the economic conditions call for and that no underlying economic principles seem to exist. The problem with the notion that inflation is being created largely by sky-high employment and increasing wages is that it’s mostly untrue. But the most powerful factions of our society tend to work backward from their conclusions and they want it to be the case that inflation is being caused by better worker conditions. According to a recent paper by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the answer to the inflationary cycle largely lies in places the most powerful people in society don’t really care to look, most notably the corporate sector. As the EPI paper details, “The price of just By Mark Anderson, NMBA Legal and Legislative Assistant n continued on page 12
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