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By the time you finish reading this, your wallet will already be lighter.

"Bidenflation" is setting multidecadal records. According to new consumer price index data, inflation has hit 6.2% year over year, its fastest pace in 31 years. Inflation in October alone rose by 0.9%, up from an already alarming 0.4% in September and 0.3% in August. You have to go all the way back to George H.W. Bush's presidency to find anything like it โ€” and we all know what happened to George Bush in the election the following year.

To counter the public's justifiable fear of inflation eating away at their wealth, the White House has ... well, put its head in the sand, denying that inflation is a problem. The denials are becoming less credible with each new release of monthly data.

Although the Biden administration released a letter signed by 17 economists, stating that his current agenda would "ease longer-term inflationary pressures," those economists were talking about the far future โ€” a decade down the road or more, after today's spending projects have been completed and are improving the economy's efficiency and productivity.

Joe Biden has been running around misquoting these economists. When asked about Biden's claim that his agenda would "reduce inflation" right away, these economists gave him the thumbs-down .

"If you mean that inflation will go down in the period after the bills are passed, that is not an implication of these slow-working effects," said MIT's Peter Diamond.

"I don't know what 'it would reduce inflation' means," said Princeton's Sir Angus Deaton. "Certainly not in the next few months."

Pro-Biden pundits in the media have not been oblivious to the danger. They are evidently so concerned about inflation hurting Biden and his party in the next election that they are trying to pretend the numbers are not real โ€” or at any rate that they don't matter. Some of them have even been arguing that we should welcome the inflation, even though they'll follow up by swearing up and down that we're not having any inflation, so what are you talking about?
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But Paul Krugman, probably the most prominent downplayer of inflation in recent weeks, learned as a college freshman that inflation occurs when too much money is chasing too little in the way of goods and services. That sounds a lot like what's happening right now โ€” a spike in government spending in reaction to the coronavirus, then empty store shelves and absent waitstaff everywhere consumers go.

Even though they are obviously wrong to lie, the media's friends of Joe are right to be afraid and right to make excuses for their favorite political party. In historical terms, inflation is one of the greatest unsung political dangers for any incumbent president or congressional majority.

As Michael Barone points out in his latest Washington Examiner column, bouts of postwar inflation prompted voters to throw Democrats out of power after World War I and again after World War II. In the chaotic inflationary period of the late 1970s, irate voters ditched Republican Gerald Ford after a partial term and then threw out Jimmy Carter after a single term. That latter election was one of the great bloodbaths of the modern era, as out-of-power Republicans gained 12 Senate seats and control of the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1955.

Biden and his party are already on their way to a shellacking in the 2022 midterm elections if this month's off-year elections were any indication. And as inflation keeps running out of control, Biden faces a complicated series of choices because this inflation poses a direct challenge to his agenda. His Build Back Better bill, no matter what misleading thing the White House says next, will be hugely inflationary and will probably hurt him even more if it passes. But between the inflation already underway and Biden's failure as an effective president in passing his agenda, he's facing recriminations from the voters either way.

Biden would do well to confront the problem head-on and get things out of the way as far before the election as possible. He should immediately abandon the bill in Congress โ€” it has no chance of passing anyway, so that's no great loss โ€” and set out a plan to work with the Federal Reserve to wring inflation out of the economy.

It's going to hurt a lot โ€” it hurt Ronald Reagan's party a lot in 1982 โ€” but it is very much in Biden's interest to get the pain over with as quickly as possible. Democrats are already facing an ugly enough 2022 between Biden's failures in foreign and domestic policy, controversy over racialist influence in school curricula, and anger over needless, never-ending COVID-19 restrictions. They don't need this inflation monkey on their backs in addition to everything else.