The 3.3% figure is annual, normally called "last 12 months" to avoid confusion with a fixed year.

"Trump's pick to lead economic data agency floats ending monthly jobs report" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czerwl2xee4o

Kamala tried to warn us about this. It's also quite clear that Kamala lost the first 10 minutes of the debate. It's only later on when Trump went full-Trump that Kamala was able to turn the debate around.

You can blame it on Kamala, Trump, the media or the American public, but this sort of stuff is very hard to communicate effectively.

Tariffs are taxes and are inflationary. "China is going to pay" is a lie. People tried to communicate this, but weren't believed, so gave up.

Now you might ask why the Fed targets 2% and not 0% and that's because a world where inflation is 0% is brutal for debtors which is basically everyone. The fact that inflations occurs basically guarantees that people who don't over leverage won't be stuck in perpetual debt. That means people can take out loans, start companies and buy equipment to grow the economy. If we had 0% inflation all of that activity becomes much harder.

Another way to see it is:

If you have mortgage inflation comes of the liability of that debt since inflation is not just inflating all the bad parts but all the parts of the economy. And de-risks investment mostly because debt is in nominal terms. Now you cannot have rabid inflation but its not just as though anything above 0% inflation is bad.

The biggest inflation shock of recent era was Russian invasion of Ukraine. And, fine, that didn't "just" happen, but hard to blame Western politicians for it. Western governments had to make a choice between inflation and security. You might disagree with the choice, but it's a balance.

Further, inflation and growth are largely affected by a single lever, central bank rates, and making growth better makes inflation worse, in general. Central banks (mostly) diligently try to walk the right path. Of course I'm not referring to cases where politicians just say, hey you there Independent Central Bank Head, lower rates or else. But that case is an exception.

Then, salaries may or may not keep up with inflation. Inflation is generally bad, as businesses have a hard time lowering notional salaries - but they can more easily not increase them with inflation. But as a strict matter they can do it anyway and labour force can get screwed if they don't hold enough bargaining power.

So I would say that largely, yes, inflation does just happen, and it can be exacerbated by some degree (none to massively) by bad politics. But I think to say it's always just bad government is not right.

This seems like a bit of an odd take, because the topic is wholesale prices in July 2025, whereas you conflate historically high tariffs, which indeed have begun recently, with other factors from years ago. As you yourself noted, interest rates are now high enough that there's a demand (by Trump) to lower them.

Speaking of the pandemic, you didn't mention supply chain disruptions, panic purchases, and hoarding, which resulted in product shortages and price gouging.

Moreover, a lot of the money from the government during the pandemic went directly to businesses, often wealthy businesses, rather than to consumers. But the poor consumers always get the blame for just wanting to be able to pay their bills in the face of massive job losses and other difficulties outside their control. Business bailouts and subsidies are somehow never considered "printing money". To me, the printing money complaint, which almost always is directed toward the government checks to individuals, has a very "let them eat cake" feel.

In a vacuum, if we all have 3-10% more money and things are 3-10% more expensive, we're not poorer unless there are secondary effects that make us poorer. It's the secondary effects that inflation has on investment, markets, and transfer of wealth that are negative. The effects of debt collapse during economic crisis is a considerably more expensive effect, and not one that's good for the poor, or the rich, or the middle class or anyone.

If you "genuinely cannot understand this", consider that the traditional perspective is that the point of an economy is to produce useful goods and services, not to produce an aesthetically pleasing inflation number. Recall that, in early 2020, markets were facing the greatest panic since the 1929 crash. The debt collapse and deflation that followed then precipitated an enormous amount of misery. I'm personally pretty happy we didn't get another Great Depression; Covid was bad enough without that happening.

We won't all, because we can invest savings instead of holding them in cash.

A positive inflation rate, around 2% per year, is deliberately targeted as a long-term average. This is because having a constant expectation of declining value pressures consumers to consume, which keeps money moving through the economy. (We aren't all entrepreneurs, so we can't all be motivated by the opportunity cost of not starting a business.)

> In fact, I see people pressuring the Fed to lower (!) rates

There have been such calls because the inflation problem that prompted spiking the interest rates appeared to have been mostly resolved, because interest rates at the current level are expected to continue exerting downward pressure on inflation, and mostly because high rates have other negative effects.

Boom-bust cycles are not inherently bad. In the long run, history shows that the booms more than outweigh the busts, and suggests (at least to me) that the net result is better than it would be with slower constant growth (which is hard to manage, since you never know when the next big technological innovation will come).

> the tariffs don't seem to be going anywhere

While high in historical perspective, the tariffs are not effectively as high as the headlines make them sound, and there is a lot more to the economy than foreign trade.

> government spending and debt are at all-time highs.

The system is largely designed to work this way — in all developed nations, not just the US.

All the things you mentioned, certainly, but there's a more direct, more obvious route for policy to control inflation. It is (at least in Australia) one of several artificial measures generated based on the weighted changes in pricing of a "basket of goods" selected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the specifics of which is altered unilaterally, somewhat regularly and relatively opaquely (the info is public but you have to go digging and general discussions tend to ignore it and just say "inflation" or "the CPI".

So inflation is literally defined by these decisions. And while I'm sure the majority are well-meaning, there are still so many very plausible, very easily defendable ways to influence the outcome. eg. iirc around 2021 they decided to count capital gains on housing against the CPI "because families' net worth was increasing" despite the fact that a whole bunch of people were struggling to buy groceries. Such an accountant-ish thing to do.

This would only be true if you kept your money under a mattress. Stocks and real estate have posted strong real returns. Even risk-free interest exceeds 3%. Same for increased wages.

Stocks and home ownership are time-tested, effective hedges against loss of purchasing power.

the tariffs don't seem to be going anywhere, and government spending and debt are at all-time highs.

I agree the tariffs were a mistake, but the national debt at all time highs does not mean Americans become poorer. The fallacy of composition is to assume that the national debt is like a household debt. The national debt does not affect the ability of Americans to accumulate significant real-levels of wealth with investments and income.