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Stupid government extravagant spending causes inflation. Just like in Carter economy.I wasn't reading the WSJ in the 1970's, so a couple of years ago I went to the library and found the mid-70's issues and read through some of the commentary. There was a good article in about 1975 or 1976 by Vermont Royster (1914-1996) who was editor of the editorial page from 1958 to 1971. The gist of it was that regardless of how rich a country is, it can't afford to subsidize everything, which at that time in the beginning years of the Great Society seemed to pretty much be the philosophy and thus ten years later the country was ravaged by double digit inflation at the same time as economic stagnation, partially aided by the OPEC embargo, but the inflation was well underway beginning in the late 60's and OPEC just exacerbated it. By 1980 welfare spending was between 3% and 4% of GDP and peaked at 4.75 in 2010. It's something like 2.5% today.
https://twitter.com/DavidL206/status/999766039893192704
This point in particular is kind of ironic: