In his latest column for the New York Times, award-winning economist and best-selling author Paul Krugman says that despite new studies showing higher inflation would benefit the U.S. economy, American policymakers are unlikely to do anything for one chief reason: because the "oligarchs" who fund our elections don't want to see their holdings decrease in value.

Krugman builds his argument off a new report from the IMF, which included in its analysis a strong implication that an inflation target even higher than the one the U.S. has currently (to eventually get it to around 2 percent) is too low for promoting more growth and more universal prosperity. Yet despite its own work, Krugman says, the IMF appears unwilling to outright endorse a higher inflation target.

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"So what makes the obvious unsayable?" Krugman asks. "In a direct sense, what we’re seeing is the power of conventional wisdom. But conventional wisdom doesn’t come from nowhere, and I’m increasingly convinced that our failure to deal with high unemployment has a lot to do with class interests."

Krugman hasn't dropped his famous theory of Very Serious People promoting sadomonetarism, however. Instead, he writes that the VSP embrace "painful" remedies to economic stagnation — rather than higher inflation or other ways to reduce unemployment and increase aggregate demand — in part due to "class interests":