Kevin Williamson’s Welcome to the Paradise of the Real was written over two years ago and I still refer it to readers.Sneaky Inflation is equal to that piece in bringing sound economic thought to bear on current issues with an engaging style.  Both pieces are in National Review.

An excerpt from Sneaky Inflation:

You see the same economics at work across all government activity. As Andrew Flowers reports at FiveThirtyEight, in 1998 about 60 percent of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) spending went directly to poor people; today, that figure is only about 25 percent, with the rest of the money being diverted to other programs, many of which benefit important political constituencies rather than actual poor people. Medicaid isn’t a program for poor people, but a program for large, profitable, politically connected firms bidding on contracts worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

The strange fact is that we are not seeing very much inflation at all except in those areas in which the government is trying to make things more affordable. We could probably get the inflation rate down to practically 0.00 percent — if only Washington would stop helping.

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