Years ago, I had a Korean economics professor who was a genius, or at least I thought he was.  He made economics easy to understand even if his accent did not make him easy to understand.  Nevertheless, I loved his classes and learned a lot.  My favorite memory was when we were talking about inflation and he said: "Want to know about inflation?  Ask your mother.  She does a lot more real-world shopping than you do."

I think of my old Ph.D. professor every time I ask my wife about food prices.  She lets me see all of the contradictions of inflation.  It all looks so different when you are putting the items in the cart than it does on the news.

Let's take a look at this from Tipp Insights:

The dark shadow of Bidenomics is 16.2% inflation under Biden's watch. It is a complete and utter failure that has led to stagflation in the United States. No amount of sugarcoating can hide the truth.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) released by the government on Thursday showed a 3.2% year-over-year increase in prices from July 2022 to July 2023.

The CPI rate had declined steadily from a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022 to 3.0% in June 2023 for 12 consecutive months. The latest reading broke that run by increasing to 3.2% in July.

The CPI rose 0.2% between June 2023 and July 2023 after adjusting for seasonality and by the same amount of 0.2% on an unadjusted basis.

We can post numbers all day long. Here is the bottom line, as the article points out:

Nowadays, you need $1,000 in earnings to purchase what $862 could buy when Biden assumed office. Alternatively, if you used to require $50,000 annually to cover household expenses before Biden's presidency, you now need $58,000.

Again, $1,000 to purchase what cost $862 before. That's inflation in a nutshell.

How did we get here?  It wasn't COVID.  It was bad management of our economy or all of those dollars flowing from the Treasury.

Another man known as the little professor, or Casey Stengel, once said of his 1962 Mets, who lost 120 games:

Been in this game one-hundred years, but I see new ways to lose 'em I never knew existed before.

I think that my old Korean economics professor would say something similar about the way that this Biden administration has screwed up inflation.

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Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.