Inflation is everywhere, and it isn’t all about the value of money.

There’s grade inflation at university, for example, with Harvard student GPAs soaring from an average of 2.55 in 1950 to 3.80 today. It’s not because students are smarter or better educated. In truth, they’re not better rewarded either, because stratospheric GPAs are understood to have lost their value.

FLORIDA'S ECONOMY, TOUTED BY DESANTIS, IS IN STRONG SHAPE BUT WITH A BIG HEADACHE

Likewise with monetary inflation, brought to you by President Joe Biden, which hit 9.1% in 2022, the worst in 40 years until the Federal Reserve put the squeeze on borrowers. Wages inflated like GPAs, but also like GPAs, their value didn’t keep up. It puts one in mind of GOP Sen. Everett Dirksen’s notorious but probably apocryphal comment, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Rising spending and rising incomes are overmatched by falling values.

One might adapt Dirksen’s allusion to deflating value and apply it to today’s divisive politics by noting, “An impeachment here, an impeachment there, and sooner or later you’re talking real nonsense.” Yes, there is impeachment inflation, or at least impeachment rhetoric inflation.

The first president impeached was Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was 106 years before the next near presidential impeachment, of Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974 before the threat could become reality. But we didn’t have to wait another 106 years for the next impeachment crisis, only 24. That was Bill Clinton in 1998. After that, impeachment chatter became incessant, just the background noise of living in Washington. It was only 22 years to the next impeachment, of Donald Trump in 2020, and only one year until his second, in 2021.

Whatever the merits of these political indictments, they have undeniably cheapened impeachment. Just like being held in contempt of Congress, impeachment has lost its power either to intimidate the accused or shock the public.

Now, there is talk of beginning an impeachment investigation of Biden, and his family corruption certainly requires close inspection and public airing. But even if impeachment were, in this case, appropriate, as Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) seems to suggest, it would be ineffective.

That’s because of impeachment inflation. Few people take the threat of a Biden impeachment seriously. Even Republicans in the Senate don’t, and they are in the minority anyway. Like all previously impeached presidents, Biden would be acquitted, even if he’s as guilty as sin. It would serve only as a way for Republicans publicly to divulge more details of the president’s dishonesty, which some of them figure would help electorally.

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In other words, impeachment has become a mere political weapon, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Where once it was the ultimate constitutional sanction, it is now a campaign tactic.

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