And the thing is it doesn't necessarily have to be one cause. In fact it almost certainly isn't just one thing. But yes, inflating the USD is the elephant in

And the thing is it doesn't necessarily have to be one cause. In fact it almost certainly isn't just one thing. But yes, inflating the USD is the elephant in the room. I am not surprised either. Why? Because, whether one agrees with the economic decisions of the last 2 years, we have fiat currency for a reason. The whole point of being able to stretch the dollar, or not having the dollar be based on anything tangible, is so that all holders of USD are effectively taxable. That being true, is anyone from the IMF to the Federal Reserve to the US Treasury and Congress going to be upfront about the implicit taxability of the dollar? Most Americans are completely oblivious to this; although even Gen Z and Alpha are privy to price increases, most people don't conceptualize inflation as a devaluing of the dollar itself, but rather as the increase of prices of items in isolation. They don't realize that these price increases are effectively planned and that they occur to the benefit of someone else, as opposed to being the result of some force of nature or incompetence of leadership. Even those who have a sense that they are being robbed might not put two and two together, in part because of articles like these that blame easy things, like corporate fat cats or, worse, the people themselves buying "too much" at the behest of the advertising industry. If mainstream economists and politicians came out and openly said that inflation is a tax and that they're just going to keep printing more currency when they feel like it and keep raising the debt ceiling, the narrative would collapse because too many people would gradually lose faith in the system. The Soviet Union still appeared more powerful than it really was for many years, but the true reason it came crashing down was that the Russian people lost faith in it. You can keep a failing system going indefinitely if everyone believes in it and plays along with the game of charades. If people stop playing the game, all of a sudden it's apparent that everything they valued was imaginary all along. So yeah, expect more rhetorical gymnastics from DC. The incentive structure is not there to have them speak otherwise.