Last week I sent friendly letters to my three congresscritters: Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, and the irrepressible Rep. Pramila Jayapal. Jayapal is a high-caste Hindu and her Nayar caste were “advisors to the king on financial affairs and business affairs” back in the day. So, you may say, as Susan Sowerby in The Secret Garden did, “she knows.”

Here is the friendly letter that I emailed to each of them:

Dear Senator [or Congresswoman]:

Please send me your three-point plan for fighting price inflation by February 23, 2022.

I recommend that you do NOT propose any of the following policies:
1. Wage and price controls.
2. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
3. More multi-trillion dollar spending packages like Build Back Better.

Wasn’t that helpful of me! I am such a good citizen. For, after all, my senators and congresswoman are youngsters. They weren’t around in the 70s when our glorious leaders last threw us into the inflationary Tar Pits and it took an “amiable dunce” like Ronald Reagan to summon up the intestinal fortitude to fight inflation. I’m sure that they appreciate my advice.

Still, Murray and Cantwell are just as knowledgeable on the inflation front as the Nayar Jayapal. Murray was famously advertised as a capable “mom in tennis shoes” in her early political career, and Cantwell ably financed her first Senate campaign borrowing from the fortune she made at RealNetworks.

But then I thought: why doesn’t my usgovernmentspending.com have an inflation page? (Now it does!) And why don’t I add an inflation chart to this piece? You mean like this?

Warning: the 2021 number from the Bureau of Economic Analysis is an “advance estimate.”

See, I have all the necessary data on usgovernmentspending.com. I have nominal GDP and chained, or inflation-adjusted, GDP. So it’s a trivial matter to come up with annual inflation numbers and chart them.

Want a little history? Here’s US Inflation since 1960.

Ugh. You can see why my hair is almost white. As a young immigrant from Britland, it was no fun getting a 9 percent mortgage in 1979.

But then I thought, what about inflation in the years ahead? No worries: Historical Table 10.1 forecasts a Biden-moderate 2.5 percent inflation as far as the eye can see! But wait till the FY2023 budget comes out.

Here’s a question. If our noble lords and ladies can’t forecast inflation, which is everywhere a monetary phenomenon and therefore a direct product of government, what makes them think they can forecast global climate when the sun and the CO2 and the intertropical convergence zone are just doing their thing without permission from the Directors of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

Now, I am sure that all you noble lords and ladies already know all this, and you aides and staffers will soon be up to speed, but I decided, as I was gussying up my usgovernmentspending.com inflation page, to take a look at inflation in the century 1860 to 1960.

I knew, and all you lords and ladies in your DC castles, safe and snug behind your vehicle tilt-up barriers, doubtless have known for years, that the Big Problem after wars has been “resumption,” the period of deflation during which the nation got back on the gold standard at the pre-war parity. Hoo boy. Look at this. I had No Idea.

Do you see the staggering deflation after the Civil War, peaking at almost 10 percent in price declines in one year? Or in 1921 after World War I when prices declined about 15 percent in one year? Or in 1931 and 1932 after the 1929 Crash when there were two years of approximately 10 percent price deflation?

But look! After World War II, in 1946 and 1947, we had two years of 10 percent inflation. No deflation in sight! Wow! There’s nothing like two years of 10 percent inflation to pull down your federal debt that hit 120 percent of GDP at the end of the war. Don’t tell Joey!

Okay, you ask. Why didn’t we have deflation after World War II? The answer is John Maynard Keynes and the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. That’s when our noble leaders decided on a side shuffle on the monetary front. They kept the pre-war gold price of $35 per ounce of gold.  But they didn’t allow Americans to exchange their dollars for gold at the pre-war price.

So the U.S. government inflated away and everyone was happy until in 1971 the other governments in the western alliance asked to exchange their dollars for gold at $35 per ounce, and President Nixon said No. Then we got to see the man behind the curtain.

Now, I’m sure that all you regime nobles and noblettes learned all that at WEF honcho Klaus Schwab’s Young Leaders school. But I had to figure it out for myself.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.