What’s really causing America’s inflation woes

FEE’s Brad Polumbo writes, “Consumer price inflation just hit the highest level in 30 years. Prices rose 6.2 percent from October 2020 to October 2021, according to new government data, prompting a new reckoning with 'temporary' inflation that’s proving not so short-lived after all. I interviewed Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican from Kentucky, to get his perspective on what’s driving our mounting inflation woes.

“There's joint blame: Congress is initially to blame for spending money it doesn’t have and then the Federal Reserve says, oh, it's just our job to paper over this.” https://t.co/Y9E9cxsf3A

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November 17, 2021

'I think inflation is pretty easy to explain and people need to know what causes inflation,' the senator said. '[The federal government] gets debt, then the Federal Reserve prints up new money to pay for the debt, that new money enters circulation, and that expansion of the money supply [leads to] inflation.'

Paul argued that this kind of inflation, rooted in government policies, is a 'bait-and-switch' form of taxation.

'Big government politicians offer you things they say are ‘free’: free childcare, free healthcare, free college, free cell phones, free this, free that—but it's not really free,' he said. 'Either someone else is going to pay for it through higher taxes, or they're going to pay for it through borrowing and ultimately inflation.”

Read the entire column.