Since 2020, US inflation has increased by almost 600%.
600%!!
Many of my liberal friends claim that this is due to post-COVID financial meltdown, and that inflation is up all over the world. This can’t possibly be the fault of our current president.
Conservatives will rightly point out that US inflation is higher than everyone else’s. Japan, Taiwan, Australia, France, Switzerland, and others are currently posting much lower rates. If everyone else was struggling with inflation, we could maybe blame COVID and give Biden a break. That’s not the case, and there’s only one person to blame.
So, it’s no surprise that my not-so-liberal friends are posting things like this on Facebook:
What’s missing from this crowd’s perspective is that, even in 2020, US inflation was higher than many other countries. Comparing our inflation rate to theirs doesn’t get us very far.
I say we instead compare our inflation increase to everyone else’s.
If our rate went up by 600% in the last couple of years, how does that compare to others? Did we blow everyone out of the water? You’d think so. Thankfully, this isn’t a difficult thing to investigate; global inflation trackers are plentiful on the internet. I found one that’s easy to navigate, cross checked their numbers with a few others, and came up with the following (posted from high to low). Please fact check at your leisure:
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- Japan inflation in 2020: ~.1%
- current inflation: 2.4%
- inflation increase: 2300%
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- Germany inflation in 2020: .5%
- current inflation: 7.9%
- inflation increase: 1480%
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- Canada inflation in 2020: .7%
- current inflation: 7.7%
- inflation increase: 1000%
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- France inflation in 2020: .48%
- current inflation: 5.2%
- inflation increase: 983%
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- UK inflation in 2020: .9%
- current inflation: 9%
- inflation increase: 900%
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- US inflation in 2020: 1.2%
- current inflation: 8.6%
- inflation increase: 596%
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- Australia inflation in 2020: .8%
- current inflation: 5.1%
- inflation increase: 537%
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- Switzerland inflation in 2020: .7%
- current inflation: 2.9%
- inflation increase: 314%
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- New Zealand in 2020: 1.7%
- current inflation: 2.9%
- inflation increase: 305%
Something happened. COVID? Ukraine? All of the above? If inflation rates have skyrocketed all over the world, it seems silly to blame it on one country, high as that country’s inflation might be, especially following a near unrivaled global pandemic.
How can we expect a pre-pandemic level of business-as-usual following something that wiped out so many people, taxed the worldwide healthcare system and is now driving unprecedented supply chain issues? Add to that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing rise in fuel prices (again, globally) and nobody should be surprised that all prices are on the rise.
But that’s my armchair analysis. I’m no economist, nor is my friend who commented on Bidenflation above. Moving forward, I’ll spare you my ramblings and offer a few thoughts from the world of qualified opinion:
Alan Greenspan, 13th chair of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006:
The U.S. has been at risk of sparking demand-side inflation for some time. As the economy recovers from the pandemic and demand for consumer goods and services has risen, so too have prices. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 5.4% in September from a year earlier, the sharpest increase since August 2008. Most of this current price change is likely being driven by pandemic-related shifts that should subside over time.
Justin Wolfers, Australian economist and public policy scholar, professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics:
I think we learned that the coronavirus is not just a health threat, but also an economic threat. Things have probably never been shaken up as much in my lifetime as they have been over the past couple of years. So that’s the first big factor. The second is, ever since Putin started amassing troops on the border with Ukraine, gas prices started going up. And you can draw a straight line from Putin to the price that you’re seeing at the pump.
A quickie from the folks at Harvard:
I’m happy to blame Biden for his many missteps and would personally love it if things like inflation were so simple that we could blame them on someone else’s bad politics.
But it turns out that inflation, especially on a global level, is a complicated thing.
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
