Blame (Mostly) Democrats for High Prices

There's something almost endearingly human about the urge to assign blame for inflation. We want a culprit, a clear causal chain: this policy led to that price hike, and if we just reverse the policy, the universe will snap back to equilibrium. But economies don't work like pendulums—they work like weather systems, or better yet, like turbulent fluids, where a butterfly flapping its wings in a supply chain can become a hurricane at the grocery store. The article, found at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2026/08/19/blame_mostly_democrats_for_high_prices_708327.html, argues that Biden's spending sprees were the primary accelerant for the inflation fire, while acknowledging that Trump's team hasn't yet managed to fully douse the flames. That's a fair political take, but from a systems perspective, it's like blaming a single spark for a forest fire while ignoring the drought, the wind, and the decades of accumulated underbrush. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the energy transition, corporate pricing power, and a labor market gone haywire—these all fed into a feedback loop that no single presidency could fully control. What fascinates me is the asymmetry of perception. We notice inflation when it's high, but we barely register the immense machinery that keeps prices stable most of the time. It's like dark matter—invisible, pervasive, and only revealing itself through its gravitational pull on the observable. When that machinery breaks, as it did in 2021-2022, we suddenly become aware of how fragile our economic reality actually is. And here's the weirdest part: the very act of blaming might change the outcome. Expectations are a powerful force in economics—they're almost like quantum measurement. If people believe inflation will persist, they demand higher wages, which pushes prices up, which confirms their belief. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, a closed loop of perception and reality. Whether Democrats or Republicans are "at fault" matters less than whether the public believes the system is stabilizing. The article's framing—blame mostly Democrats—might be good politics, but it's terrible physics.