If that’s not enough to unsettle the White House and its allies, consider this: Presidents have almost no power to ease the pain of inflation, and the voting public cuts presidents no slack at all because of that impotence. Look into the toolbox of our country’s chief executive and you’ll find it empty of effective tools, filled instead with devices now obsolete or laughable or meaningless or politically destructive.

Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were fans of “jawboning” — using their influence to persuade unions and companies to hold down wage and price increases. But those were days when large, powerful unions — the auto workers, steel workers, Teamsters — and large, powerful corporations like General Motors or US Steel could significantly affect the larger economy with their decisions. Who would Joe Biden “jawbone” now? The thousands of potential truck drivers whose absence from the road is helping to drive up costs? Asian factories where a microchip shortage has driven up the cost of new cars, which in turn has driven up the cost of used cars? The OPEC+ cartel, which has no interest in increasing oil production and may indeed be looking forward to $100 a barrel costs?

Richard Nixon tried a much more blunt instrument: In August of 1971, using powers that a Democratic Congress had delegated to him, he imposed a 90-day freeze on wages and prices. In the short run, it worked; but just as a temporary seal does not actually fix a leak, inflation resumed as soon as the controls ended. Inflation was running at over 11 percent by the summer of 1974, a drag on the economy that undermined Nixon’s standing even as the Watergate waters were rising. (As Bill Clinton would later demonstrate, a vibrant, full employment-low inflation economy is enormously helpful to a politically embattled president.)