Why is this issue different from all other issues?

 Why, on this night, do we eat only bitter herbs?  Actually, many of us like horseradish, but nobody likes inflation.  And already, I'm off-track and off-season.  Whatever.  Inflation remains the big issue of the day, and shall remain so.  Powell did, indeed, raise interest rates 75 basis points, and there are more rate hikes on the way because he has one job, and no, it's not a stupid job.  Actually, technically, Powell has two jobs.  Dual-mandate, 'n all, but right now, inflation is so far over the NAIRU that his priority is clear.  Inflation.  And inflation is a fundamentally different issue, which is where I am going after a typically verbose lead-in.

Inflation really is a different issue.  For any given political issue, if it affects you, ask two questions:  1) could you have done something differently, and 2) can you do something now, regardless of government policy?

There are times when something really, truly is not your fault, and you could not possibly have done anything differently.  The classic examples are genetic conditions, or medical conditions that just happen.  If you have the shitty luck to have some such issue, then there is truly nothing that you could have done.  Some can be mediated by choices, and some cannot.  Sometimes, you got the short straw in the genetic lottery.  But other times, you made a choice.  Perhaps a difficult choice, perhaps a constrained choice, but a choice.  Dropping out of school, for example, would be a bad choice.  Plenty of us in the educational field scream it from the mountain ivory tower tops.

Then there's the what-now question.  Everyone fucks up.  Rarely does anyone fuck up so badly that there are just no more options.  The nature of fucking up is that it constrains future choices, and makes the path back harder.  Good luck and/or good choices make future choices easier.  But, having fucked up, as everyone inevitably does, the question becomes, what now?

Consider, then, the twin problems:  when it isn't your fault, and when you have few or no options to respond.  Those are the problem-problems.  The kinds of problems that inspire me to get all tautological, 'n stuff.

Inflation gets you on both ends.  First, it gets everyone.  In principle, someone who saw it coming could short the market in the right way, stockpile a few things, and make more money in the shorting process than he loses in higher short term prices, but those prices hit everyone.  You could be the most careful, cautious, rational, good-natured, responsible person in the world, and inflation'll get 'ya, just as much as a world-class fuck-up.  Inflation is woker-'n woke.  It does not discriminate.  But, since discriminating by level of responsibility might have been a good thing, you could argue that this is a bad thing about inflation, and that's part of my point.

Next, there's the what-now question.  What now?  You still need to buy shit.  You can try to play the market, but if you try to place bets based on your reading of inflation, you're just gambling, not investing.  Basically, there is no what-now.  You pay, motherfucker, you pay, and then you pay some more.  You ride it out, and everyone pays the piper, along with the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, and everyone else, at the inflated prices of... um... inflation.  And you'd pay just as much if I had found a clever way to resolve that line, so it doesn't matter that I didn't.  What now?  You pay.

So inflation really is different.  People forgot that, or never had the "lived experience" of it, so never thought to study it, but yes, it's different.  Welcome to the experience of living it.  See, math could have taught you this, but well, there's me and my math again.

But it's not my fault!  I did everything right!

Yup, inflation doesn't care.

What do I do?

Suck it up, ride it out, and listen when the math nerds say that inflation is brutal rather than just chalking it up to class bias.