Inflation will continue as the number one issue facing the country until it subsides, because it offends American myth. We’ve been told since time immemorial that capitalism has perfectly calibrated the economy so that anyone can get anything, anytime, however they want it. And that the wonders of globalization and other efficiencies will grind down the cost of this massive undertaking to a nib, continuously improving U.S. living standards. As long as you ignore the deprivation and poverty that makes this narrative presumably possible (and actually implausible), you can celebrate the greatest of all possible worlds.
John Kenneth Galbraith had a name for this: the affluent society, where we only need concern ourselves with equitably splitting the proceeds of our productive spirit.
Whenever this equilibrium is threatened, politics spin out of control. After the stock market crashed in 1929, leading to mass production shortages, we eventually reconceived how the state interacts with the economy. When the 1973 Arab oil embargo led to gas lines and eventually to runaway prices, it made space for the Reagan Revolution and spooked liberal economists to fear the inflation bogeyman to this day.
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