A shrinking economy plus soaring prices earned the “stagflation” moniker under Carter as prices rose as much as 13.5% a year, unemployment hit 7.8% and growth went negative. It’s a triple whammy of pain: high prices, folks out of work, fewer goods and services.

And then as now, the nation faced a shortage of gasoline. Americans were struggling under an economy in shambles.

Carter blamed the public, summing up the problem as a “crisis of confidence” in his famous “Malaise” speech. Today, President Joe Biden blames Vladimir Putin, Republicans and greedy oil companies (when he’s not pretending that everything’s sure to get better real soon).

Yet Biden and fellow Democrats were warned about inflation, even by economists on the left, before they rammed through their $1.9 trillion spending bill last year (with not one Republican vote). They waged a war on fossil fuels that helped spark the oil shortages and pain at the pump.

And they did practically nothing as supply-chain snarls helped produce empty shelves and higher prices everywhere. (Heck, the baby-formula shortage is still getting worse.)