The Federal Reserve printed roughly $4 trillion between March 2020 and early 2022, expanding its balance sheet from $4.2 trillion to over $8.9 trillion, and Jerome Powell stood in front of cameras calling the resulting price explosion "transitory." Inflation is a tax. Every dollar created without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from savers to the first spenders. The government and its preferred financial institutions spent those fresh dollars before prices adjusted. You spent them after, at a grocery store already pricing in the damage. By June 2022, CPI hit 9.1 percent, the highest since 1981. Rent, food, used cars, energy: all of it ran hot simultaneously. Monetary expansion redistributes wealth rather than creating it, taking from your pocket to give to whoever holds newly printed money first. Powell's "transitory" call was deliberate. The Fed had every price signal and money supply number available. M2 grew 27 percent in 2020 alone. That expansion predicted exactly what followed. The Fed created this inflation deliberately, financing pandemic-era federal spending that Congress could not politically tax you to fund directly. Printing was the cowardly path. You paid through purchasing power destruction rather than a visible tax line on your return, which is precisely why they preferred it.