And no one around with sufficient brains to fill The Big Shoes.

Inflation is tied to the difference between the “True GNP” (i.e., the total value of new goods and services, less the value of depreciated/consumed existing goods and services.) and the change in the actual money supply (e.g., how much the government ACTUALLY puts into play vs. what they say they put into play.

Changing the deficit adds money to the system just as though they’d printed it and put it into circulation.

And we’ve been steadily increasing the deficit for MANY decades (no, don’t give me that BS of how Clinton “balanced” it. Clinton “balanced the budget” in the same way you balance the budget when you have a monthly shortfall of cash vs. expenditures and “eliminated” said shortfall by taking out a cash advance off the CC, rather than just charging some of the shit directly to the CC.).

This really zoomed as the 2000s rolled around, first with the Housing BS, then the War on Terror, then the Housing collapse, then “Quantitative Easing” — that last being a tap dancing euphemism for inflating the money supply.

Trump, unfortunately, did nothing to help this, and Brandon has been spending money like he had Scrooge’s money bin, and got to keep everything he spent.

The real question is: “Why did inflation not leap forwards around Bush’s second term?”

My own suspicion is that we vastly underestimate the value of much IP, so the estimates of GNP are woefully undercounted. So we actually had lots more value in the system than was realized.

Note: Pssst — Don’t tell The Left about this.

Inflation has finally taken off because they finally manage to catch up with it.

I will add that, in late 2020, my little county undertook to borrow a great deal of money to rebuild the courthouse we lost in the 2017 hurricane. The plan was to borrow on a relatively short-term basis and refinance a few years out. Not much liking the borrowing proposal, I quizzed the county financial advisor sharply about his assumption that we could refinance in a few years at a comparable rate. Had he noticed whom we had just elected president? Did he not think we were at risk of inflation? He thought I was jumping at shadows, and certainly he had the last several decades of massive deficit spending, without significant inflation, to bolster his position. That’s one reason that I wonder now whether what we were missing was the new element of crushing production nationwide.

Yellen advises who is ever making the decisions and may have given poor advice. Please be advised as to who she supervises. She does not supervise the director of the Office of Management and Budget and she does not supervise the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. She supervises the payments system, bond issues, tax collection, and the most salient component of the bank examiners’ corps.

No, it’s usually the other way around.

Guess what? Economists, like engineers, make mistakes. If you fancy you’ll get more serviceable policy advice consulting some other occupational segment, you won’t.

Check out an academic econ paper: all full of partial differential equations or other fairly advanced math, with theorems, etc; just like one would expect to see in a STEM paper.
The difference however is that in an econ paper, all sorts of assumptions are made to make the math tractable. As such, the “models” model an economy not of this solar system.
No wonder they get it wrong so often.

Of course the other real problem, and more problematic, is that economists develop their economic thinking / models to first conform to their political ideology. Thus you have free market (conservative) economists and leftist economists, the latter or which are never lacking in “demonstrating” that greater govt. involvement will provide a ready solution to whatever ails an economy.

Jared Bernstein, formerly Obama’s econ advisor and now Biden’s has 100% perfect record of being wrong in the policies he has promoted.
No need to mention Paul Krugman who famously predicted the internet would amount to nothing or that the Trump economy would be the Great Depression II;
or Paul Samuelson MIT PHD, who, despite all his fancy mathematical econometric models was unable to tell if the USSR or the USA had a better economic system.
Perhaps if he had actually visited the USSR – and seen all the empty store shelves- and noted that to buy a car there, it had to be paid in full about 10 YEARS !! before you could actually obtain it, it may have focused his math-laden brain; but I doubt it.

Check out Long Term Capital Management, in which the theories of two Nobel Prize winning economists were actually applied by a hedge fund and when it went bust – by applying those theories in the real world – it almost brought down the world’s entire financial system in 1998. This hedge fund was chock a block with MIT and Harvard PHD grads in econ and finance in addition to the two Nobel Prize winning economists.

Last, but not least, Mr MIT PHD Ben Bernanke, Fed chair in 2008 – during the housing bust – famously predicted just a few months (!!) before the shiite hit the fan, that the housing mess would not affect the economy and would be confined to only the housing market.
Recall that the 2008 financial bust was the worst economic dislocation since the great depression of the 1930s.

The FED needs to be rolled back into its original mission when established in 1913; to be the lender of last resort to prevent bank runs or other financial panics.

But like all bureaucracies, and with the blessing of Congress (which is more than happy to fob off their constitutionally mandated responsibilities onto unaccountable agencies they have birthed) , it has morphed into a powerful decision making body that is accountable to nobody and whose members suffer no consequences when they make horrible decisions that hurt the citizenry.
But like all academics (you need a PHD to be hired by the FED as an economist) they are so arrogant and self absorbed, they actually believe they can “manage and guide” a gigantic economy.
They are literally a dangerous joke.

She may be the only member of the cabinet who isn’t a bucket of whale chum. It’s possible the man who was Governor of Iowa is tolerable.

Again, the problem has been that they monetized the deficits.