Conservative Delusions About Inflation

Krugman goes on like an old record, Conservative Delusions About Inflation "In fact, hardly any of the people who predicted runaway inflation have acknowledged that they were wrong, and that the error suggests something amiss with their approach. Some have offered lame excuses; some, following in the footsteps of climate-change deniers, have gone down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole, claiming that we really do have soaring inflation, but the government is lying about the numbers (and by the way, we’re not talking about random bloggers or something; we’re talking about famous Harvard professors). Mainly, though, the currency-debasement crowd just keeps repeating the same lines, ignoring its utter failure in prognostication."

"Well, it turns out that money is indeed a kind of theological issue. Many on the right are hostile to any kind of government activism, seeing it as the thin edge of the wedge — if you concede that the Fed can sometimes help the economy by creating “fiat money,” the next thing you know liberals will confiscate your wealth and give it to the 47 percent. Also, let’s not forget that quite a few influential conservatives, including Mr. Ryan, draw their inspiration from Ayn Rand novels in which the gold standard takes on essentially sacred status."

Vox does too, 8 reasons to ignore the latest round of inflation hysteria, with graphs and stuff.

"It's a sign of how weird America's priorities have become that Torsten Slock of Deutsche Bank actually presented the chart above as evidence that wage demands are getting out of control. The red line shows actual wages. It says that since 1986 the five worst years for wage growth were 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 and that 2014 is set to be the sixth-worst. The blue line shown an indicator of wage pressures, and it shows that pressure has risen from its weakest reading ever all the way back up to a level that we previously only saw at the low-points of business cycles. If you think that Ronald Reagan's second term, and every single year of the Bush, Clinton, and W. Bush administrations featured out-of-control wage inflation, then you should worry about wage inflation today. But not otherwise."