New Economic Perspectives has the third installment, Real Fiscal Responsibility 3; Carter: Inflation and Health Care, of its series. I’ll just excerpt one quote that addresses my complaint about the second installment.

Cost-push inflation cannot be eliminated without killing the economy if one relies on increased taxes, reduced Government spending and high interest rates, which is the deficit hawk prescription. All that will and did do is to move toward macroeconomic and microeconomic austerity. The way cost-push inflation has to be fixed is through bringing alternative sources of supply, wage and price controls, and rationing online.

I guess I had outsized expectations for this explanation. The comment I posted, slightly edited, is shown below.

Thank you for saying what Carter should have done to rein in Cost Push Inflation.

The explanation was not as overwhelmingly irrefutable as I had hoped. Perhaps that was a bit much to expect.

Wage and price controls had been tried by Nixon and Ford as my faulty memory tells me. It did not work for them. You alluded to the enforcement by a Carter staff that was only 10% the size of what Nixon had. So how come it didn’t work for Nixon either? Admittedly the size of the staff doesn’t guarantee success of a poorly conceived program.

Rationing of gasoline happened almost automatically with the long gas lines, alternate day purchasing, and more. Of course, I don’t remember any rationing of other pertroleum based products.

Of course, in WWII there were many more far-reaching and effective programs to hold down inflation. I even have now come to understand how selling war bonds was not a way of financing the war, but was a way of controlling inflation.

As for Reagan’s solution to the problem. I always attributed it to the near depression he caused. This cut the demand for oil so much that it broke OPEC’s ability to control the prices. That was a very effective way of ending cost push inflation, although at the price of great pain to a lot of people. So, despite talk of supply side economics that was supposed to increase supply without the need to have increasing prices, it was actually demand side economics that worked – cut the demand for oil so prices would stop rising. I have not done any research on the myriad factors that could have been responsible for the end to inflation, so I could very well be wrong in my story, no matter how plausible it might sound to me.