Federal Reserve, Biden, & Congress Face Unthinkable

The biggest reason the U.S. economy is an increasingly confusing mess is simple: the Federal Reserve is trying to slow down the economy while President Joe Biden and the congressional Democrats are feverishly trying to stimulate it. 

The minutes of the July meeting of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, released on August 17, show the governors and Chairman Jerome Powell are losing enthusiasm for the ongoing interest rate increases the Fed has imposed this year to combat the worst rate of inflation in more than four decades.
That is good news. Unfortunately, even if the Fed changes course (which is not quite imminent in any case), its efforts will be stymied by what President Biden and congressional Democrats have been doing.
“Mr. Powell described 0.75-percentage-point rate rises as ‘unusually large’ and appeared to endorse projections made in June that showed rates rising by another percentage point through December, implying a slowdown in the pace of increases later this year,” The Wall Street Journal reports.
That is an improvement. There is no sensibl …