Black Friday Blowout: Inflation’s Biggest Winners (and Losers)

This chart makes one truth impossible to ignore: America’s inflation crisis wasn’t shared equally — workers carried the burden while corporations captured the gains.

The historic surge to 9.1% inflation in 2022 didn’t happen by chance. It was the direct result of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s reckless spending spree in 2021–2022, which flooded the economy with trillions at the exact moment supply chains were strained. That decision ignited the worst inflation in 40 years.

Workers paid the immediate price, losing 5.4% of their real purchasing power in two years. Meanwhile, corporations used the chaos to raise prices far beyond their own rising costs, pushing profit margins from 11.3% to 19.2% and keeping them there. Since 2019, corporate profits are up 62.6% while real wages are up only 4%.

But here’s the hopeful piece the chart also points toward:
America still has underlying strengths — thanks to the permanence of the Trump tax cuts, pro-growth deregulation, smarter trade agreements, and a leaner federal footprint (even if modest). Those policies laid a foundation that’s helping pull wages back up, stabilize growth, and steer the country in the right direction despite Washington’s self-inflicted wounds.

Even so, there’s no magic bullet for the kind of intentional incompetence and centralized government overreach that produced this inflation crisis. Inflation is a symptom — the deeper issue is a political class that refuses to restrain itself. And that’s exactly what our Founders warned us about from day one: concentrated power will always spend too much, distort markets, and leave ordinary Americans holding the bill.

The real takeaway:
Biden’s spending binge lit the fire. Workers absorbed the hit. Corporations pocketed the windfall. But America’s built-in strengths — tax relief, deregulation, competitive trade policy — are nudging us back on course. The challenge now is the same one our Founders faced: limiting centralized government so prosperity isn’t something Washington steals, but something Americans can actually keep.