My key takeaways: 1. The primary reason for the reduction in our purchasing power is not the supply-chain disruptions occasioned by government responses to the

My key takeaways: 1. The primary reason for the reduction in our purchasing power is not the supply-chain disruptions occasioned by government responses to the COVID pandemic, let alone Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine 2. It is actions taken by the federal government—including the Biden administration, the Trump administration, Congress and the Federal Reserve—that have landed us in our present inflationary mess 3. For 2 decades we have been told that middle class is well an alive, but it is just "squeezed", but at this point it is clear, that US middle class has been sold by the Congress to the highest bidder and is dying painful death 4. In 2011, the last time inflation was on the rise, the then-president of the New York Federal Reserve, William Dudley, ventured into a working-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, to give a speech explaining why inflation wasn’t a big deal 5. Finding that he wasn’t making an impact, Dudley famously picked up an iPad 2 and told his audience, “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful.” “I can’t eat an iPad!” someone in the audience shouted back 6. Overhanging all this was a Federal Reserve that, from 2009 to 2014, deployed what’s called quantitative easing—the purchase of preset amounts of government bonds and other financial assets to inject money into the economy—to boost economic activity 7. Making matters worse is the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve, which measure inflation, have long relied on measurements that make it appear as if inflation is not as bad as it really is 8. As if to add insult to injury, “scarcity inflation,” which is due, in part, to disruptions to the supply chain, have compounded our inflationary woes