Does Inflation Ever Come Down?

Popular Economics Weekly

“From the preceding month, the PCE price index for March increased 0.7 percent. From the same month one year ago, the PCE price index for March increased 3.5 percent.” BEA.gov

FREDpce

Inflation is rising again, to no one’s surprise, from its low of 2.3 percent in April 2025 when Trump first announced his worldwide tariff hikes, to 3.5 percent in March this year. The reasons are clear, inflation is rising on Trump’s watch, not Biden’s.

And inflation almost never comes down without another recession. This is verified in the above graph of Federal Reserve’s preferred Personal Consumption Expenditure price index from 1980. The gray bars are the five recessions since 1980, and each clearly shows the beginning of the sharp downward move of prices in the PCE index

The only time prices have come down without a recession since then was during President Biden’s term—from its high in June 2022 to slightly above 3 percent at the end of his term.

Biden could do this because the Fed used its best tool to combat inflation; raising interest rates at the same time as Biden succeeded in lowering the federal debt by raising corporate taxes to counter the huge influx of government money injected into the economy ($5 trillion) from Biden’s bipartisan Infrastructure, Inflation Reduction and CHIPS Acts.

The bills were passed to inaugurate the biggest modernization of the U.S. economy since the Great Depression that employed a record number of workers.

So it is possible to bring down inflation without a recession. And there is substantial harm, especially to working Americans who face higher prices for basic necessities, such as gas and healthcare, for prolonging this inflation surge.

What had caused the five recessions since 1980? Republican administrations cut taxes without paying for them, ballooning the federal debt instead of reducing it. Recessions (gray bars) occurred in 1980, 1981, 1990, 2008-09, all during Republican administrations. The short 2000 recession happened because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is an unnecessary inflation surge, in other words. It’s because of multiple wars being fought and a Republican congress that will not curb a president who doesn’t care about the costs and harm he is doing to Americans and the American economy.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Who Won the Civil War?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“Just more than one week after President Donald Trump unveiled plans to deploy troops from the D.C. National Guard and to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department to tackle crime in Washington, six states have pledged to send in their own National Guard troops to pitch in with the effort.” Fox News

NYTimes

The civil war isn’t over? The Republican Party, envious of the blue states and a federal government that protect the rights of all Americans, has been attempting to take away as many of those protections as possible since Donald Trump returned to power.

Republicans have attacked such basic freedoms as women’s rights (abortion), immigrants’ rights (birth right citizenship), minorities and the poorest (loss of Medicare, Obamacare benefits) and seniors with cutbacks in social security services.

Trump added fuel to the fire when he said the Charlottesville torch carrying parade in 2017 that chanted racist, Nazi and antisemitic slogans had “very fine people on both sides.”

And since the big ugly tax cut bill was passed, Trump has sent National Guard Troops to Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, cities with black mayors (Chicago and Philadelphia may be next). It’s now obvious the Trump’s Republican Party has become the party of White Nationalist Christians, as if Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a mere blip on the screen of history that Republicans since the Jim Crow era have attempted to erase.

Six red (formerly confederate) states; Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee; have also sent a contingent of their National Guard to “police” DC with the mission to aid in fighting crime.

Yet three of those red states—South Carolina, Louisiana, and Tennessee, rank in the top ten states with the highest rates of violent crime. Why aren’t they policing their own cities, such as Memphis, Tennessee that has the highest violent crime rate in the country?

Red States don’t have those services for a reason. Generations of control by Republicans haven’t raised minimum wages, have weakened unions’ right to collective bargaining with right to work laws, and provided fewer health care services or environmental protection.

That’s why the minimum wage in Blue states can be more than twice that of Red states (Washington State is $17/hr versus Texas’ $7.25/hr, the national minimum age). When most families are barely earning enough to get by, employers have their pick of distraught, panicked workers willing to work for subsistence wages.

It’s become increasingly clear that Trump’s Republican Party doesn’t want to believe that it lost the civil war.

They have instead chosen to make it a cultural war between the Haves (blue states) and Have-nots (red states) by attacking the human rights and climate protections in blue states that far outclass those in red states and has resulted in the huge economic and cultural divide between them.

Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Red states produce just 29 percent of our income and wealth, according to the Hartman Report, a progressive podcast. The median family income in Blue states is $74,243 vs. $63,553 in the red states. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.

Donald Trump and his Republican-led red states should be wanting to emulate the best parts of blue states, instead of invading them: such as with better environmental protections, higher incomes, lower poverty rates, crime rates, and better health care above all.

But it might result in citizens of the red states wanting those protections as well, and Republicans losing their hold on power over them.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen