For a glimpse of the condescension on inflation that oozes from the establishment press feature the Times’s dispatch Thursday. “Inflation Is Basically Back to Normal,” the Grey Lady’s headline avers. “Why Do Voters Still Feel Blah?” They are not dumb. They know that inflation has slowed, prices aren’t retreating, just rising more slowly. What but “blah” are they to feel as the gold value of their dollars plunges to less than a 2,700th of an ounce?

That’s the background against which prices — in fiat dollars — are up some 20 percent. Just since President Biden took the oath. That trend was confirmed in yesterday’s inflation news that the pace of price increases is nearing the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent a year. The Personal Consumption Expenditures index rose by 2.1 percent in September. That pace will nearly halve, in the space of a few decades, the savings of working Americans. 

So why is the Times flummoxed that voters are irate? “Grocery inflation has been cooling sharply,” the Times says. Yet one working mother of two, “Tamira Flamer, 27, says she hasn’t noticed,” the Times notes. “What she knows is that paper plates and meat remain more expensive than they were a few years ago.” More to the point, per the Times, is that Ms. Flamer is “an undecided voter,” and her frustration “underscores a challenge” for Vice President Harris. 

Hence the concern of the Times — and the rest of the left-leaning press. It just can’t grasp why voters would as they head to the polls “say that they are very focused on the economy” and “yet,” surveys suggest, “feel relatively glum” about the economic record. This, the Times frets, “could hurt Ms. Harris while helping her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.” Dang, though, “the lingering pessimism is also something of a puzzle.”

“What might be happening,” that Times confesses, is that “consumers may focus more on price levels than price changes.” This “sticker shock” could be “a simple reason that many people still feel iffy about the economy.” After all, household staples like sugar and eggs cost some 40 percent more than in 2020, Pew Research says. Bread is up 46 percent, and peanut butter costs 49 percent more. Roast beef is up 44 percent.

Viewed in this light, the fact that prices are now rising but 2.1 percent is cold comfort for Americans. It reflects the Biden-Harris administration’s legacy of inflation — the soaring price increases that were triggered by the White House, and the Democrats in Congress, when they enacted trillions in stimulus spending in 2021 when the economy was already recovering. Inflation was abetted, too, by Biden-Harris high-tax, high-spend, high-regulate policies. 

It’s no wonder that voters are “annoyed that prices are higher than they were before the pandemic,” as the Times reports. The Wall Street Journal, too, reports that nearly half of consumers say the economy is worse off now because of high prices. What’s left unsaid in the mainstream press is that the persistence of these high prices is traceable to the nature of the money Americans are using — fiat dollars that have severed any tie to gold. 

It’s not a coincidence that as prices surge, the dollar, in terms of gold, plummets. As late as 1971 the dollar was worth a 35th of an ounce of the monetary metal. At the turn of the century the dollar fetched around a 265th of an ounce. The greenback is now fetching less than a 2,700th of an ounce, and falling. The end of the dollar’s link to gold, combined with the deficit spending, is the reason why prices keep ratcheting higher without ever falling back.

The discipline required by a gold standard — in which currency is convertible into specie — requires governments and central banks to keep prices stable. If prices jump, as they did, say, in wartime, they recede in peacetime. The need now for the restoration of a dollar defined in gold is thrown into sharp relief by the Biden-Harris inflation. Until honest money is restored, no one needs to be surprised as to why voters feel, as the Times says, “blah.”