At a White House summit tomorrow, President Joe Biden will repeat his proclamation of a goal to end hunger in America by 2030. In 1969, President Richard Nixon promised to end hunger at a similar White House summit. The vast expansion of federal food assistance after Nixon’s pledge failed to end the problem, but that won’t deter Biden from claiming that new federal handouts will end hunger.
“At the rate things are going, we are all going to end up working for the Japanese.”
—Lester Thurow, MIT economist, 1989
“The United States is rapidly becoming a colony of Japan.”
—Congresswoman Helen Bentley, 1990
“The Japanese can buy our buildings, our Wall Street firms, and there’s virtually nothing to stop them. In fact, bidding on a building in New York is an act of futility, because the Japanese will pay more than it’s worth just to screw us. They want to own Manhattan.”
—Donald Trump, March 1990
The word “inflation” is heard and read everywhere these days.
However, since different people sometimes have very different understandings of inflation, here is a definition:
Inflation is the sustained rise in the prices of goods across the board.
This definition conveys that inflation means that the increase in prices of goods is not just a one-off but permanently; and that not just some goods prices go up, but all.
The Federal Reserve has a legal dual mandate to minimize unemployment and price inflation. The current “dual” between the two mandates is to reduce price inflation by increasing interest rates to increase unemployment and kill businesses to choke off aggregate demand. This has been the most important economic and investment issue this year and this dual minimization procedure has dominated Fed policy for at least three-quarters of a century.
