“There is nothing so confining as the prisons of our own perceptions.”

William Shakespeare

As we ride the rollercoaster of potential doom into the 2024 election, facts have gone the way of the Dodo bird. While inflation is a costly reality, the fundamental causes are greatly misunderstood because they are complex and do not lend themselves to clever slogans.

Long-lasting periods of inflation have several fundamental causes, one of which is easy money policy. Easy money policy is when a country’s central bank, in our case, the Federal Reserve, sets the interest rate too low or increases money growth too rapidly. This sparks inflation.

From a high of almost 20% in 1980, the interest rates fell to a low of 0.09% in October 2014. They began a gradual increase to 2.43% in March 2019. With the onset of the pandemic, they collapsed again in May 2021 to 0.05%.

In January 2022, they began steadily rising to 5.33% as the Fed tried to slow inflationary growth.

Another perhaps less evident but equally impactful factor on rising costs is corporate profits. In 2022, the last year meaningful data is available, the top 25 food companies worldwide generated $1.5 trillion in revenue and $155 billion in profits.

For 2023, three of the largest oil and gas companies showed combined profits of $85.6 billion. In 2017, the corporate tax rate was cut to 21%, increasing corporate profits.

Focusing exclusively on the money and ignoring climate change implications, fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits. Corporate profits across all sectors are rising, consumers are paying the price, and corporations are blaming labor costs on the people buying their products.

Now, what does all this boring math and numbers mean for today? When Presidential candidates say they plan to reduce costs and either have no articulable process to do so or have a record of doing the opposite, where does that leave the electorate? Sadly, uninformed as usual.

If Mr. Trump is favored in the race for his economic policies, why did he not seek to encourage a policy targeting “easy money” and allow the rate to remain so low? And why did he not couple corporate tax reductions with some other inducement to reduce consumer costs?

In Vice President Harris’s case, she has not set economic policy. President Biden did. I am confident Vice President Harris had input, so she bears some responsibility. In that case, we look at the numbers. Inflation is decreasing, prices are stabilizing, and the Fed is cautious about lowering interest rates too quickly to avoid overstimulating the economy. Worldwide factors also need to be taken into consideration.

Thus, we face a choice. On one hand, we have a former President with a track record. He came into office on a solid economy with low interest rates. He set policies favoring corporations as what he perceived as sound policy. By the end of his term, inflation was rising, a bungled response to the pandemic was killing Americans, and the economy was in a nosedive.

But corporate profits were rising along with prices.

In 2021, the Biden-Harris administration was left with a country in tatters. Partly because of the previous administration’s policies, or lack thereof, and partly because of a worldwide economic collapse.

In simplest terms, when Mr. Trump came to the White House, the economy was growing. By 2020, under his watch, the GDP was -2.77%. In 2021, under Biden-Harris, GDP shot up to 5.95%, then slowed again in 2021, but there was still a positive growth of 1.94%.

GDP has continued to rise since 2020.

I think the solution in November is clear. Forget all the nonsense over tangential issues. Forget all the idiocy over cultural and social challenges. If you only focus on the main problem that most Americans always see as the critical issue—remember, it’s the economy stupid—the choice is clear.

Returning to failed policies won’t change the results no matter how much you try ignoring the numbers. in 2020, the American voter recognized the failure of Mr. Trump’s policies, not to mention his false claims of election fraud. It’s time for America to remember that era honestly, and reject it.

The only way to progress is to move forward.