I agree that right now we’re facing both at the same time, but either one in isolation would still be a huge problem.
Inflation at the current (reported) rate of ~3-4% is healthy for almost any economy, since it promotes spending your money on high quality, long lasting goods, or investing your money to promote growth of businesses. A little depreciation of money each year dissuades people from sitting on their cash. Even without a stock market and capitalism, inflation is an incentive for people to put their long term savings into government savings bonds, which allows for more public development today without more taxes.
BUT if inflation is too high, (even with wages increasing at the same rate, which never happens) it’s extremely difficult for people to save cash to make large purchases. Any economy that uses money needs for people to be able to afford to wait a while with their money before deciding what to do with it, otherwise people are forced to settle for lower quality goods or whatever investment opportunities are available on short notice. Less time to make wise choices with money means less productive use of that money, meaning a less productive economy overall. Not what we want.
And of course, if wages don’t keep up with inflation, either because inflation is running away or because your government has refused to increase the minimum wage at all since 2009 when the national currency was worth 1.47 times as much as it is today, 15 years later (cough cough), then obviously you’re going to run into some problems with people’s ability to afford things.
That said, I think some shady manipulation to the consumer price index is going on to make the reported inflation figures look a lot lower than the actual increase in cost of living that the majority of people are facing. The biggest offender is housing costs skyrocketing in the past decade, but not uniformly across the US. The result is that areas where this hasn’t been nearly as big of an issue falsely “balance out” critical problem areas, where people are practically being forced to either relocate or become homeless due to how rapidly housing prices have gone up.
There’s just so many different things that need to go right for an economy to be prosperous for everyone who contributes to it, and right now the people in charge of steering that economy are getting kickbacks from the people who stand to benefit the most from taking it off the rails.
