30 Years Of Inflation Crammed Into Less Than 18 Months

By Richard Stern, The Daily Signal | November 03, 2024

Make no mistake, the recent scourge of inflation and high interest rates has been a heist buried beneath economic jargon. It has transferred a tremendous amount of wealth from hardworking Americans to the federal government.

The root cause of this disaster—reckless government spending and money-printing—should serve as a reminder that the federal deficit is the bank robber, the Fed is the getaway car driver, and you are the bank.

The past few years have seen consumer goods prices increase more than they had in the prior 30 years, while staggering price increases for construction materials have helped push homeownership out of reach for tens of millions of Americans.

This whirlwind of economic horrors comes from the combination of dramatically expanding government spending and a Federal Reserve willing to print enough money to paper over deficits with inflation.  

Since the beginning of COVID-19, the annual level of federal spending has increased 45%, while the Fed has increased the money supply by 37%. Spending newly printed dollars in this way doesn’t magically create new goods and services. Instead, it has created the classic recipe for inflation; namely, more dollars chasing fewer goods and services.

This policy has inflated away nearly 20% of the purchasing power of the dollars in your paycheck and bank account.

Consumer goods price increases from October 1990 through January 2021 ran about the same as the increase from January 2021 through June 2022—roughly 14.3%. In other words, about 30 years of price increases thrown at households in less than a year and a half. To make matters worse, the increase in construction materials prices has been even larger, 26.4% since President Joe Biden took office.

No wonder house prices have soared over the past few years. While this does increase the equity of current homeowners, it also tends to lock people into their current homes and box young families out of owning a home altogether.

When the government runs a large deficit—as it is now with over $2 trillion in annual deficits—the Fed has a choice: It can print money to accommodate and soak up the new debt, creating a ticking time bomb of inflation, or it can leave the money supply unchanged and allow federal deficits to crowd out private access to funding, sending interest rates through the roof as money becomes scarcer.

That leaves prospective homeowners without financing to buy a home and leaves businesses without investment capital to expand operations and create more jobs and goods and services.

With inflation rapidly climbing early in 2022, the Fed chose the latter. By pushing interest rates higher, the Fed didn’t alleviate the burden of high levels of government spending. It simply shifted the pain of the burden from runaway inflation to runaway interest rates, exacerbating the worsening financial picture for American families.

Mortgage rates soared from around 2.8% in January 2021, when Biden took office, to over 7.5% by October 2023. The Fed, on its own, couldn’t remove the burden from American families, it could only choose the type of burden.

That has left homeownership less affordable than it has been for generations. In January 2021, first-year interest costs on a typical new mortgage were around $8,200, or 16% of a full-time median worker’s annual pay when President Donald Trump left office. Today, it’s around $21,900, consuming more than 36% of a full-time median worker’s annual pay.

This bludgeoning will, tragically, have lingering effects as well. Today, a new mortgage on a median home will cost $320,000 more in just interest costs over 30 years than that of a mortgage from the end of 2020—a tremendous 257% increase in total mortgage interest costs.

If a new homeowner were able to, instead, keep this money and invest it over the same 30-year period, he or she could easily have more than $1 million more saved up for retirement.

The cost of the inflation and interest rate surges have levied a truly crushing burden on the backs of hardworking American families that will likely echo through generations to come.

Richard Stern is director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation.

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