Ed Morrissey
HotAir.com
11/11/2010
If hyperinflation arrives, Time Magazine wants its readers to know who the real culprits are. It won’t be the federal government that hiked annual spending by 38% in three years and began running trillion-dollar deficits. It won’t be the Congress that kept raising debt limits to allow for that spending spree. And it won’t be the Federal Reserve that, in desperation over the government’s spending and debt spree, began printing money to artificially keep interest rates low. No, the real culprit will be the political movement that opposes all of the above, according to The Curious Capitalist:
In a recent paper, called Temporarily Unstable Government Debt and Inflation, which can be downloaded from this website, Leeper has a chart that he unofficially calls the Tea Party shock graph, on page 25. Before the Tea Party, inflation is rising slowly. But in the first year the Tea Party or a group with similar views wins the Presidency or takes over Congress, whamm-o. Inflation doubles, and keeps going up. He wrote the paper in October, so he puts the potential date of Tea Party takeover as 2019, but after this election Leeper concedes Tea Party induced hyper-inflation could come much sooner than that. So is Palin riding the Hyper-Inflation Express? Maybe. Here’s why…
But here’s the trick. Leeper doesn’t just model actual tax policy. He is looking at tax expectations. You don’t actually have to lower taxes for inflation to rise. Nor do you have to raise taxes to get inflation to fall, for that matter. Leeper says as we get closer to the point that is looks like the government is unwilling to raise taxes people will get increasingly nervous about our debt. And that’s the problem with the Tea Party…
Read the rest at HotAir.com
H/T Instapundit:
PREPARING AN EXCULPATORY BLAME NARRATIVE FOR THE DEMOCRATS: Time claims Tea Party will cause hyperinflation. Yeah, that’s whose fault it’ll be. . . .
UPDATE: Reader Jeff Dobbs emails:
It wasn’t that long ago that the Tea Party was just a flash-in-the-pan mob of nobodies who would fade away with little political or electoral influence, according to these same bright lights. But now the Tea Party controls the levers of power such that they may destroy the entire world!!!!!
We’ve come a long way baby.
Heh.
Update: At Verum Serum, Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey: Tea Partiers are today’s slave-owners
