Democrats must challenge Republican lies about inflation. The Republican message is simple: “Inflation is caused by Democrat’s unrestrained spending. Elect us and we’ll stop that and fix it.” Both parts of that message are lies.

Inflation is everywhere in the world and we’re generally on the good side of average. That last Covid payment is not what turned the world upside down. We’re still fighting the product and labor bottlenecks that persist. Republicans haven’t proposed one single bit of a plan.

Furthermore, as several authors have pointed out, Republicans are anything but a safe choice. We’re not talking about the old conservative Republicans. These are Trump’s burn down the house people. With the debt ceiling blackmail, Republicans are going after Medicare and Social Security with a threat of liquidity collapse if they don’t get it. We’re going to outdo the British Conservatives with Liz Truss!

Finally it needs to be recognized that the Republican argument on inflation is just a rehashing of the usual Republican program of presents to the rich. Inflation is the lastest bogeyman to say we can’t have public services or anything else that rich people don’t want to pay for.