Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) On Surging Inflation: This Was One Of My Biggest Concerns Around American Rescue Plan
The Labor Department said Thursday that consumer prices jumped 7.5% last month compared with a year earlier, the steepest year-over-year increase since February 1982. When measured from December to January, inflation was 0.6%, the same as the previous month and more than economists had expected. Prices rose 0.7% from October to November and 0.9% from September to October. Shortages of supplies and workers, heavy doses of federal aid, ultra-low interest rates and robust consumer spending combined to send inflation leaping in the past year. And there are few signs that it will slow significantly anytime soon.
Guy Benson got reaction to the news from Congressman Peter Meijer (R-MI) who anticipated this over 11 months ago. He said the following:
“This was one of my biggest concerns around the American Rescue Plan. Besides the way in which it was cobbled together. I mean, COVID relief had been overwhelmingly bipartisan until Biden came in. You know, I’m going to work across the aisle and they just rammed it through on budget reconciliation. It was just astounding to me and showed the bad faith, you know, just my first month and a half in Congress. But, you know, we had probably a 1.5 trillion dollar shortfall in GDP because of the pandemic, and we responded to that with six seven plus trillion dollars of government surplus spending. Right. So you throw all that into the mix and we have a lot of dollars chasing too few goods trying to figure out where they’re going to go. And it’s not at all a surprise that’s going to create a rise in costs. At the same time, we’re going through a manipulating the labor market and making it impossible for companies to do what they need to do to survive. I do not talk to a single employer or organization that isn’t just terrified of where things are going and are at their wits end with all the different directions they’re being pulled in so that inflation is an inevitable consequence.”
