As he pitched his Senate colleagues on a plan to balance the federal budget in 2018, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) warned that rising inflation would be one of the consequences of a failure to bring deficit spending under control.

At the time, Paul was pushing a bill that would have required a spending cut equal to one penny out of every dollar in the federal budget. The so-called "Penny Plan" would have balanced the federal budget by 2023, Paul claimed at the time, without requiring serious cuts to any specific programs. Paul exerted senatorial privilege to force a vote on the package; it failed 21–76.

That was before the federal government borrowed trillions of dollars in the name of combatting the COVID-19 pandemic. It was before President Joe Biden's $1 trillion infrastructure package. It was before four more years of bulging federal budgets authorized by a Congress that's increasingly blithe about borrowing.

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