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
Inflation is rising again, to no one’s surprise, from its l2.3 percent low in April 2025 when Trump first announced his worldwide tariff hikes, to 3.5 percent in March this year. The reasons is 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 1980 was during President Biden’s term—from its high in June 2022 of +7 percent 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 (instead of cutting 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
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