Inflation Spikes to New 40-Year High, With Food and Gas Prices Leading the Surge

A new report shows inflation hitting 40-year highs. The personal consumption expenditures index rose by 6.4 percent in February, the largest increase since 1982, according to The New York Times . The PCE posted a 6.1…

IJR SyndicatedMar 31, 20223 min read

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The increase in that measure was the largest since 1983.

Richard Moody, chief economist of Regions Financial, said the factors that led to the increase will “sustain Inflation pressures for some time to come.”

In an Op-Ed published on Fox Business, Steve Forbes, chairman of Forbes Media, criticized the Biden administration’s response to Inflation.

“The best thing Washington can do is to get out of the way. The free market will eventually sort out the disruptions brought on by those lockdowns,” Forbes wrote.

“Unfortunately, the Biden crowd is playing havoc with this healing process,” he wrote.

Forbes wrote that although pandemic spending might have been a necessity in early 2020, “it was clear by the end of 2020 that the spending was overdone.”

“Nonetheless, the newly-installed Biden administration ginned up even more spending,” he said. “The tsunami of federal expenditures would have been far worse if Congress hadn’t halted the President’s obese Build Back Better bill. Still, we had lots of money and disrupted supply. Prices go up.”

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Forbes noted that the Russian invasion is a contributing factor to global food shortages but said even there the Biden administration is bungling the solution.

“To be sure, events can trigger higher prices, the prime one now being Putin’s barbarous invasion of Ukraine and its impact on the cost of food,” he wrote. “Ukraine has been called the breadbasket of Europe. It’s hard to plant seeds when bombs are falling. The US Department of Agriculture projects that Russian and Ukrainian wheat exports will fall by at least 7 million metric tons this year.

“Ukraine could win this war fairly quickly if the Biden enabled the country to get all the weapons it needs.”

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.