Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are doing their best to make inflation worse by spending vast sums of money to reward key political supporters and to try to buy themselves some love before the midterms, currently looking like they will be a slaughter for their party. (The Republican polling advantage today is stronger than it has been in 40 years — Democrats should think about how much people must hate them to vote for the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ivermectin junkies.) But the way you end inflation — the thing you end up doing once all the painless options have been tried and failed — is raising interest rates. You might remember that back in 2008, we raised interest rates a smidgen, which caused ridiculously inflated housing prices to come a little closer back to Earth — and sparked a worldwide economic emergency. Raising interest rates is going to play havoc on the cheap-credit model of selling houses, cars, and college educations, along with much else. And it could be very hard for the biggest debtor of all: the U.S. government, which already spends more than half a trillion dollars a year just on interest payments. We spent $522,767,299,265.34 on interest payments in 2020, with interest rates that were low by historical standards. If interest rates start to move back toward their historic average, that number could easily double or treble — or much worse.

This is the predictable stuff. Nobody saw Covid-19 coming (though I suppose there is a reason we’ve had all those zombie movies and zombie television series for so many years — a kind of folk intuition, perhaps), but, this stuff, we see it coming. You can dick around with different economic models and debate sticky prices and the velocity of money and all that stuff, but that’s just Wile E. Coyote out there in the Arizona desert insisting that the anvil that’s about to fall on his head weighs only 100 pounds instead of 200 pounds. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders may insist that there is no anvil, but sensible people can foresee that the big heavy 50c-Rockwell anvil-shaped hunk of steel with “Acme Anvil Corp.” engraved on the side and hurtling toward our delicate little American skulls is probably — wild guess! — an anvil.