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So today I am excited to welcome back, a very good friend of the panel, Nathan Tankus. Nathan is the publisher of the Notes on the

Crisis newsletter where he writes about macroeconomics, money, and market governance. He is also

the research director of the Modern Money Network. Nathan, welcome back to Death Panel.

Great to be here. I'm so glad to have you here to talk about a topic that we've had you on a couple

times to discuss, but we're going to have a sort of whole new conversation about inflation today.

And right now, inflation is billed as a top line concern going into the midterm election

cycle. And people may have noticed a steady drip of coverage or polling over the last six

months talking about how Americans now care more about inflation than COVID policy. This has been

a political narrative that has been growing, and at the same time,

it's also something that I think many people are feeling in their day-to-day lives in terms

of price increases or their rent going up. You know, money just isn't stretching as far as it used

to. The Labor Department reported on Wednesday, August 10th that consumer prices in July were on

average 8.5% higher than in 2021. And all of the

coverage you see on this mentions these sort of quote unquote aggressive actions that are being

taken by the federal government. On Sunday, the 7th of July, the U.S. Senate passed the inflation

reduction act or the IRA. Later this week, it's expected to pass the House, and there have been a lot of victory

lapse about the IRA.

Lots of exuberant press releases and coverage of this in the media, like Paul Krugman's

piece about it in the New York Times op-ed pages called, Did Democrats Just Save

...