What does inflation have to do with getting a tooth pulled?
Seriously, I can explain that one.
When I was ten or 11 years old, my baby teeth weren’t coming out fast enough so the dentist decided that four of them had to come out all at once.
I went through the usual preparations for such things: a topical anesthetic on the places where the needle would go in, followed by injections of whatever painkiller was the flavor of the month back in 1980.
“You may,” the dentist assured me with pliers in his hand, “experience some discomfort.”
A moment later my young self barely managed not to let loose a stream of expletives so filthy that the dentist and the dental technician would have nearly died of shame shortly before spontaneously combusting.
Instead, I very politely shouted, “THAT’S NOT DISCOMFORT. THAT’S PAIN. A LOT OF PAIN.”
“Maybe you need more lidocaine.”
With food prices up 20% over the last year, gas prices doubled, new car prices up 13%, used car prices up 40%, near-zero interest rates making borrowing all-too-easy, and Washington adding another $1.5 trillion in funny money to the bonfire of Joe Biden’s vanities …
… well, it doesn’t end there. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has some more bad news for you.
“We’re likely,” she said late last week, “to see another year in which 12-month inflation numbers remain very uncomfortably high.”
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen:
“We’re likely to see another year in which 12-month inflation numbers remain very uncomfortably high.” pic.twitter.com/PbDCheGpTe
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 13, 2022
Barron’s reported on Monday that price hikes are “rampant” at America’s retailers, with more stores choosing to “pass their increased costs on to their customers.”
It doesn’t stop there, either.
We might look back fondly on last year’s big food price hikes. Combined, Russia and Ukraine produce 10% of the world’s calories. But now Ukraine is being destroyed and no one outside of China wants to trade with Russia. That’s why the UN warned last week that food and feed prices could rise by up to 22%.
I’m old enough to remember when Donald Trump was President and Vladimir Putin wasn’t invading Ukraine.
Then there’s alleged Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who blithely told us last week that we could escape crushing gas prices if we’d just buy eclectic cars.
Well:
The price for a Tesla (TSLA) may be going up again as the automaker confronts surging inflation.
“I think they will announce in the next two weeks probably another price increase. They still have the ability to pass that [inflation] on to the consumer, very similar to Netflix, Amazon Prime and other stalwarts,” Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives said on Yahoo Finance Live.
You may experience some discomfort. Just about every time you buy pretty much anything.
“THAT’S NOT DISCOMFORT. THAT’S PAIN. A LOT OF PAIN.”
Unfortunately, there’s no easy shot of lidocaine we can take to ease inflation.
At this late date in our two-decade-long indulgence, the only cure for the pain of inflation is the pain of recession, job loss, and derailing Washington’s gravy train.
That’s what President Ronald Reagan and Fed Chair Paul Volcker did in 1981-82, risking everything on the bet that choking off inflation would — after the pain subsided — result in an economic boom.
The ’80s, as you’ll recall, ended up as almost unprecedented boom times.
We have neither a Reagan nor a Volcker.
We have a dim-witted and increasingly senescent Presidentish Joe Biden, whose most intellectual contribution to our nation’s long-running economic debate was to peevishly insist that inflation hawk “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”
Back in January, White House spokesweasel Jen Psaki tried to calm America’s frayed nerves by telling us to “have a margarita.”
I joked at the time that you’d better make it a double, but now I’m afraid that’s going to cost four times as much.
If only it were the Bidens and Yellens and Buttigiegs and Psakis feeling the same discomfort the rest of us feel, we might not mind it so much.
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