“The ‘inflation tax’ does exist, but not for everybody. The middle class and the top 1% of Americans actually benefited from periods of high inflation in recent decades. ‘With regard to the issue of whether there is really a net inflation tax, the answer is that it is true for some groups only,’ Wolff wrote…
“For the bottom two quintiles of the wealth distribution, however, inflation remains a nightmare. Wolff found that this group’s NIG (net inflation gain) was -$19,300, or almost half of their mean income. ‘It is clear that poor households were particularly hard hit by inflation,’ he wrote.”