Tim Cavanaugh responds to his Malkin Award nomination. The most deluded part:
I’d like to take "soaring inflation" and "moribund economy" together: Sullivan posts two charts, one showing GDP growth averaging flat-or-flattish since 2007, and another showing inflation in every quarter except one. During that period, inflation has been a cumulative 10.97, according to a Koch-funded rightwing hate group called the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I suggest Sullivan take a look at the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Fund reports to get a sense of how much household net worth Americans have lost over those same four years, while the value of their money has been literally decimated. That’s a double-whammy called "stagflation," which like the name of Voldemort I don’t care to pronounce because I remember the original.
Does he? The inflation chart seen above, from Wikipedia Commons, puts Cavanaugh's inflation claims in historical perspective. Cavanaugh tries to make inflation under Obama sound scary by talking about cumulative inflation but there is nothing particularly alarming about the current inflation rate or the fact that inflation has gone up 10.97 percent total in five years. During real stagflation, in 1980, inflation was 13.5 percent in a single year. Jonathan Bernstein unpacks Cavanaugh's inflation fantasy:
[I]nflation, as Sullivan documents, has been basically flat during the Obama presidency. It's not just Cavanaugh, either, although at least some of the inflation Chicken Littles, such as Tom Coburn, only say that it's just around the corner. Of course, Ron Paul and his gang, along with all the goldbugs, are big on this one. My favorite thing is that there's a whole group of people who think it's clever to call the Fed chair "Zimbabwe Ben." You know, because the three great examples of hyperinflation are Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany, and Bernanke-era US.
The Dish 