Thank you for listening to and sharing our body politic.

It is the end of the year, and we continue to look out for your feedback.

So after you listen today, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review.

We read those because your ideas matter to us.

Thanks so much. This is our body politic. I'm the creator and host for Rai Chodea. Right now, you're hearing a series of interviews that we've recorded a few weeks back.

That's because my team and I are taking in some much-needed rest in recuperation, and I hope

everyone listening can too.

It's what will need the most as we prepare to tackle the year ahead.

2022 will bring us more elections, more investigations into our democracy, more economic pressures,

and hopefully more conversations about what we can do to fight for our right to a meaningful life in the U.S.

That includes the right to be able to support ourselves and our families.

My next guest is going to help us examine the state of our economy,

the pressure points, and who feels them the most. In the fall, the annual rate of inflation in the

U.S. hit 6.2%. That's the highest it's been in over three decades. Jamila Michner is

Associate Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University

and co-director of Cornell's Center for Health Equity. Her research focuses on poverty,

racial inequality, and public policy in the United States. She's also ArbadiPolitics

analyst. Professor Michener, welcome back to Our Body Politics. Thanks for having me back.

You know, as I've been looking at these questions of inflation, et cetera, I kind of went back to a

memory from my childhood where my mother and I were sitting in our secondhand VW bug,

waiting in a gas line during the Carter administration.

And it was a time when people were worried about the supply chain,

...