If the government calculated price increases the same way it did in the 1980s, we’d ALREADY be in Jimmy Carter territory, write former restaurant empire CEO ANDY PUZDER and ex-senator JIM TALENT
Andy Puzder is a former CEO of CKE Restaurants, chairman of 2ndVote Value Investments, Inc., and a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute.
Jim Talent is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and the Chairman of the Reagan Institute’s National Leadership Council
The outlook for the U.S. economy is bad and potentially getting worse.
On Thursday, the Commerce Department released new consumer spending numbers showing that the prices Americans are paying for goods and services climbed 6.3% over the past year, as inflation maintained its upward momentum.
Just 24 hours earlier, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned, yet again, that his efforts to rein in runaway price increases by raising interest rates may plunge the nation into recession.
And he said it’s worth the risk.
‘The bigger mistake to make—let’s put it that way—would be to fail to restore price stability,’ he said at the European Central Bank’s annual economic policy conference in Portugal.
Prior to that revised GDP numbers showed the US economy contracted even more than initially reported in the first quarter of the fiscal year, as more consumers opted to save instead of spending their hard-earned dollars.