Concerns are mounting regarding the Biden administration’s inability to curb rising inflation. Excessive inflation is, of course, a bad thing in and of itself, but policymakers and pundits alike seem to be missing a crucial part of the problem.
The relationship between civil disorder and inflation is a fairly intuitive one. Imagine you are a worker without the luxury of wages adjusted for the cost of living. Imagine further that you lack substantial noncurrency assets — that is, stocks that keep their value amid inflation, or a house that rises in value. A very large class of people fits this description. When the dollar loses value, so do their savings. Their paychecks effectively shrink each week. Incomes become stagnant, the cost of goods increases. People like this are left financially worse off.
Given that poverty is associated with increased criminality, it can be credibly claimed that runaway inflation will add fuel to the fire with regard to our crime problem. This isn’t just conjecture — according to the International Monetary Fund, it’s established economics.
Being poor does not morally excuse violating the law, but the consequences of such an outcome impose a negative cost on society nonetheless. Inflation even has the capacity to make communities less safe through its connection with income inequality. This is because income inequality has a very robust relationship with violent crime; an increase in the former causes a rise in the latter.
The connection between inflation and income inequality may not be immediately clear, but it’s not overly complex. Imagine another class of worker, one who has an income source that’s indexed for inflation and significant noncurrency asset holdings. Those who own leveraged properties get a double bonus — the value of their homes rises, even as the money they owe on them becomes less valuable.
Inflation will not harm this worker nearly as much as the one discussed earlier, and so the real economic gap between the two will widen.
In short, inflation increases income inequality, which, in turn, causes crime to go up. Those hit hardest will be the working poor, a constituency Democrats claim zealously to represent, although perhaps they have moved away from that toward a wealthier, whiter urban base. The working poor are least able to cope with inflation-induced cost of living hikes in the same way more affluent groups can. The crime spike that could materialize because of this would put immense stress on already strained communities.
The value of a dollar is much more than some abstract figure for balding men in Brooks Brothers suits to opine over; it has real implications for your safety and that of your loved ones. Do you want to feel comfortable walking home from work at night? Don’t want to worry about slain children in the streets? Then you ought to care about inflation.
Unfortunately, it appears that liberals in Washington don’t want to trouble themselves with such things. They’re more preoccupied with putting out cringe-worthy tweets about gay people and engaging in brazen antisemitism to bother with such things.
Price inflation just hit 5%, and homicides are up 24% nationally. We had best pray that these are temporary fluctuations rather than indicators for coming trends, because our leaders do not appear ready to tackle issues like this.
