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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Sunbird, post: 7982241, member: 116324&quot;]Really? I hadn&#039;t seen anything about that. Relatedly, digging into the whole &quot;real&quot; inflation controversy, CPI validity, etc. is on my To-Do list, but it&#039;s probably a ways out. I last remember inflation being surprisingly low, when I expected all the emergency cash injections to cause lots of inflation, just from a money supply dynamic.</p><p><br /></p><p>What struck me was the explosion in the national debt, and the strange lack of concern about it – it&#039;s like I missed a memo where we all decided that the national debt no longer mattered, had no utility or meaning as a number. Almost no voter knows what our current debt level is at any point, or is aware of the growth from year to year. It exploded after the banking crisis in 2008, with the purportedly temporary &quot;stimulus&quot; spending, but no one seemed to notice that the federal budget <i>never returned to pre-stimulus levels</i>. That was so strange – it just magically stayed at the much higher level, even with the end of Iraq War spending, and of course the end of the &quot;stimulus&quot;. All of the increase was deficit spending, since we had a slim deficit at Time 1 before the crisis (we were converging on a budget surplus as we approached 2008, amazingly, even with the wars). It was a step change in the federal budget to something like $3.5 trillion as the new floor or new normal. So I don&#039;t trust that any emergency spending from the past year or two, or upcoming spending, will be temporary, and I don&#039;t understand what people think is going to happen as a result.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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