The talking head on my local morning news show was gabbing about how “Inflation is everywhere right now. It’s unavoidable.”
He and his co-hosts complained about prices for steak and gasoline, the reduced size of standard packages of bacon that are hiding price increases, and more. It was standard chatter about inflation these days, it just happened to be on television.
But what struck me wasn’t the higher prices, but rather that inflation is “unavoidable.”
A Gallup poll released late in January found that nearly 80% of Americans expect inflation to increase over the next six months; while Americans always anticipate rising prices — even during times with virtually no inflation, surveys suggested that a lot of people still feared it — it was the highest level of inflation fear ever found by the study, eclipsing the previous record set in 2005.
With inflation rates at their highest levels in 40 years,…
