Or is it the people who have no choice but to clean up progressives’ mess?

We know who Elizabeth Warren will blame, although it may well end up being an ex post facto dodge if we’re in a recession already. Yesterday on CNN’s State of the Union, Warren told Dana Bash that Jerome Powell’s declaration of war on inflation will “tip the economy into a recession,” rather than the hyperinflationary wave that Biden and her progressive colleagues triggered:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren expressed clear concern Sunday about the Federal Reserve’s push to counter inflation on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“What’s worse than high prices and a strong economy is high prices and millions of people out of work,” Warren said to host Dana Bash. “I’m very worried that the Fed is going to tip the economy into recession.”

“A strong economy”? The economy has contracted two quarters in a row, the traditional definition of a recession. While a case can be made that the Q1 contraction was the result of a sharper-than-usual negative trade imbalance, the opposite is true of Q2. The massively positive trade imbalance in the last quarter — which is highly unusual — added roughly 1.4 points to the GDP result, and it still came in negative at -0.6%.

That is not a “strong economy.” It strongly suggests if not outright confirms that a recession is already upon us. Warren’s simply lying about a “strong economy” even on the metrics, but it’s also a fugazi for most American consumers as well. Real disposable personal income — ie, buying power — has declined five quarters in a row thanks to the corrosive effects of the inflationary wave Biden and Warren’s progressives triggered with their American Rescue Plan. The economy as they experience it is in stagflation, if not fully in recession by now.

Warren’s response ignores all of the actual data and relies on progressives’ desperate and Orwellian attempt to paint all of this as good outcomes. Paul Krugman tried the same thing at the end of last month, insisting that bad economic performance was simply a media myth. Consumers who are downscaling their purchases at Walmart and Target will beg to differ, and will note the effect that ivory towers have on perspectives.

And for that matter, so will those who assess their economic status with Gallup, which sees their “suffering index” from self-reporting households hit a new 16-year high this month.

Joe Biden and progressives have driven the economy into an inflationary ditch, and they badly need to shift blame to Jerome Powell ahead of the midterms. I couldn’t find a video clip of this part of Warren’s interview, but let’s go to the transcript to dissect her full argument.

WARREN: I just want to translate what Jerome Powell just said. What he calls some pain means putting people out of work, shutting down small businesses, because the cost of money goes up because the interest rates go up. But what worries me most here…

Powell knows this better than Warren does. He also knows that inflation is more than just “high prices” — it’s escalating prices, and it causes its own pain. It acts as a regressive tax, hammering working- and middle-class households the hardest. Forty-plus years ago, we called it the “middle-class squeeze,” as those incomes largely couldn’t access assistance programs that might have helped deal with rapidly eroding buying power.

More Warren:

WARREN: I am very — I am very worried about this, because the causes of inflation, things like the fact that COVID is still shutting down parts of the economy around the world, that we still have supply chain kinks, that we still have a war going on in Ukraine that drives up the cost of energy, and that we still have these giant corporations that are engaging in price gouging, there is nothing in raising the interest rates, nothing in Jerome Powell’s tool bag that deals directly with those.

The price-gouging argument is nonsense. Prices are going up because costs are going up all along the distribution chain; PPI inflation has been running in double digits for months now. If we still have supply kinks, that’s another point in which Biden and Pete Buttigieg bear the responsibility. It’s been well over a year since the supply-chain crisis came to the fore, and they’ve done little to nothing about it. The war in Ukraine did drive up the cost of oil, but gas prices had rapidly escalated in the US for the entire year between Biden’s inauguration and the Russian invasion. Biden and his team adopted energy policies that deliberately make gas prices higher — and Biden even bragged about his “incredible transition” that necessitated it.

Powell is having to declare war on inflation because policymakers are either doing nothing about these issues, or they are actively making the situation worse. The Fed created the environment in which an inflationary wave could occur with a dozen years of loose-money policies, which made up for low-growth policies adopted by Barack Obama. The massive spending in the pandemic made that situation worse, but the first massive tranche was an unavoidable choice between monetary risk and an economic collapse. That was not true of the second stimulus/relief package, and the third in Biden’s ARP was entirely unnecessary — and Biden was warned not to take that step.

Even just a refusal from Biden and the progressive clique dictating policy to deal rationally with inflation would force Powell to act. The sudden addition of Biden’s trillion-dollar bailout of Academia made that necessity a lot more acute. With even the PCE index of 6.3% still riding far higher than the current Fed rate range of 2.25-2.5%, Powell has to sharply escalate interest rates in order to pull inflation down. He has no choice, because ignorant policymakers like Warren keep pouring gasoline on the flames and insist on being credited with the warmth.

Warren’s spin here is a desperate attempt to blame the Fed for Biden’s utter incompetence as well as progressives’ self-serving manipulations. They want to sell erosion as strength, and contraction as growth. Orwell would be stunned.