Sarah Palin, yesterday, complaining that the Fed's monetary policy will drive up inflation::
All this pump priming will come at a serious price. And I mean that literally: everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher."
Yeah, um, except the truth is that Sarah Palin obviously hasn't gone out shopping for groceries anytime recently because inflation is basically non-existent.
But far from "rising significantly," overall prices have moved at historically low rates in recent months -- just 1.1 percent in the past year. The Wall Street Journal's Sudeep Reddy dug deeper into the numbers and found there was even less evidence to back up Palin's specific groceries claim -- inflation for food and beverages was less than .6 percent for the first nine months of the year. That's the slowest rate of price increases for food and drinks since the Labor Department began keeping track in 1968.
So Sarah Palin says inflation on groceries has been sky-high over the last year, but the truth is that this year food inflation is at its lowest level since we started keeping track. She defended herself by pointing to an article suggesting that next year food inflation will climb from it's near-zero levels to about 2% or 3%, but Palin was talking about the previous year, not the one ahead. And even if she had been talking about the year ahead, 2% or 3% would be far less food inflation than there was in late 2008, when it climbed over 6%.