Today I observed the teaching of the Russian instructor. It’s an official thing we are obligated to do, so I’m not singling her out in any way.

It was really funny because the Russian teacher decided to show a YouTube video with an innocent weather forecast. (Today’s vocabulary topic in all Beginner language classes is weather). But do you know what happens after a video on YouTube finishes playing? YouTube helpfully turns on a video it thinks you will enjoy based on your viewing history.

What do you think turned on at the end of the Russian teacher’s weather video?

Yes, of course.

Putin’s big ugly mug with a legend “Here’s an analysis of Putin’s brilliant speech from today.”

Similar videos jumped out upon the second and the third listening of the forecast video.

She’s a great teacher, though. The students are clearly learning a lot.

The inflation we are experiencing was caused by the COVID stimulus payments. Once you send people “free money,” they start spending. An enormous amount of new money that was freshly printed enters into circulation. That makes money less valuable. It’s like diamonds and gravel. Diamonds are a lot more rare, it’s harder to get them, so they are more valuable. And gravel is abundant, so it’s not valuable. A car would cost, say, 5 big diamonds but the same car would cost 5 big piles of gravel. We have turned our money from diamonds into gravel by printing a lot more of it.

Putting a lot of newly printed money into circulation always makes money worth less. Why doesn’t every country print a lot of money and make every citizen a millionaire? Because that would devalue money and everybody will be poorer than ever. The only real way to stimulate the economy is to put money into making something. Cut taxes on business, remove regulations, and people start making more things or providing more services. But putting money directly into people’s pockets – attractive as it sounds – only makes them poorer because that money is worth less and can buy less.

This is why everything is more expensive. The only way to go back to normal would be to remove that extra money out of circulation. How can a government do that? There’s no other way than raising taxes on the people who would start spending less. Those people wouldn’t be the rich or the poor. It would be the middle class. And taxing the middle class is a political suicide. So we are stuck.