Don’t Forget to Worry About Inflation!
Throughout the inflationary years of the 1970s, nearly half of Americans saw rising prices as the most important problem facing the country. Today, despite the best efforts of inflation alarmists, only 5 percent of Americans think it is.
If the public seems barely to notice the current inflation, that probably has something to do with the fact that inflation today is mostly confined to a small section of the economy. (Pictures of Money / Flickr)
Over the past few weeks, every time the onrush of inflation scare stories seemed to reach a crescendo, I would dial up a certain page of the Gallup website — the same page every time — just to reassure myself my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me.
The page I kept visiting was the one where Gallup reports the public’s answers to the following question, which the organization has been asking on a regular basis for more than seventy years: “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?”
As of yesterday, according to this “Most Important Problem” page, the share of respondents who felt that “High cost of living/Inflation” was the country’s most important problem was as follows:
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