On the recordApril 28, 2021
reserving the right to object, no serious economists across the ideological spectrum are concerned about inflation right now. No one is hiding information at the White House. I am in meetings all the time with White House officials talking about this package. No one believes--first of all, no one is hiding information. No one believes what the Senator, the junior Senator from Florida, is saying about this. Perhaps some millionaire Senators want to make this into an issue, and I hear that over and over and over, but I talk to people like Jay Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, nominated by President Trump for that position. He, of course, keeps his eye on these kinds of things, but he has expressed no strong concern about inflation. And we even know that when some experts have been concerned, they have been wrong. We saw what happened in 2008 after too many elites worried about inflation. What we really needed was to increase wages and get people back to work. The result from 2008 was a recovery that was too slow for most people, while so many of these big costs continued to rise. Our economy looks a whole lot better today than it did last year, but we can't compare where we are today with where we were last year. We were on the brink of a once-in-a-generation health and economic crisis at this time last year. Millions of people, mostly low-wage workers, lost their jobs. Our economy ground to a halt as we tried to stop the spread of the virus.…





