Inflation here? gas/grocery prices just continue to climb

Mr. Sparkle said

One thing that has changed for the worse since the 70s is our ability to (meaningfully) raise interest rates to curb inflation. I know the Fed is starting to take small nibbles at it but the impact on federal debt payments for every hike is so huge I don't think they will be able to go very far. We borrowed trillions and trillions based on the expectations of forever-zero rates -not sure we can really absorb the ballooning payments that come with even 5-10% interest rates much less the 18-20% we saw back then.

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Yeah, that's also true. We do have lower tax rates than we did in the 1970's with some amount of wiggle room to raise them without damaging the economy, but probably not enough to cover interest rates of 10%.

It's an interesting dilemma - the economy needs to slow down while simultaneously increasing supply in order to get inflation under control. But slowing down the economy is tricky, we're more likely to cause a recession which will again cause supply disruptions.

On the "plus" side, inflation like this substantially decreases the value of the national debt, as well as all those student loans people have. I remember this as a serious reason for some of the economic decisions being made in the last few years (inflate our way out of debt).