Welcome to Beg to Beg to Differ, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable

discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum from

left to center right. I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at

the Bulwark and I am joined by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal,

Damon Linker of the Week, and Linda Chavez of the Nisk Cannon Center.

Our special guest this week is Noah Smith who writes a sub-stack under the headline,

No Opinion.

And we are especially delighted to have Noah back because he was our guest about five or six months ago and we discussed the

topic that we're going to be discussing again, namely the inflation monster which has only

gotten worse.

So while the US is currently enjoying the highest job growth

that we have seen in almost four decades,

there is bad news, namely that inflation is skimming all of the gains that people

have made in wages and then some.

So the latest numbers come out show inflation running at 8.5%, while nominal wages grew at only 5.6%.

And so we've had an actual decline in inflation adjusted wages over the past year.

Now the last time we discussed this with you, you mentioned that you felt it was very important that the

Fed send the correct signals, you were concerned about inflation expectations creeping

into the economy, and you felt that if the Fed did its job

namely you know signaling that it was going to wrestle inflation to the ground by raising interest rates sufficiently

that this would nip in the bud

inflation expectations and therefore we wouldn't be in for a serious recession.

...