Inflation is a growing issue that is hitting us all, and the financial pressures continue to impact our homes, families and communities. But what is not helpful is the simplistic political rhetoric that lays responsibility for global inflation solely on a specific set of American policies.

There are quite a few factors that are contributing to our current economic status. Some are one-off events, such as the global pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Others are side effects from these events, such as labor and supply-chain shortages and the Federal Reserve aggressively raising interest rates to help curb inflation and get price growth under control.

To start, we can recall that during the COVID-19 pandemic, people were spending significantly less and saving more as no one had a clear idea of where the end of the virus would leave us economically. This spending behavior left us with deflation in our economy. As the economy began to bounce back with businesses resuming their operations and travel commencing, the high demand created a bottleneck and increased inflation. Simply put: demand was higher than supply.

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To combat the potential devastating effect on our economy throughout the pandemic and subsequent recovery, Congress passed a bipartisan spending package as well as other policies aimed to ease the economic woes. This $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package included support for small businesses, $1,400 stimulus checks (for those who qualified), expanded access to healthcare, child tax credits, funding for schools to help them reopen, financial support to state and local governments and testing and vaccination sites, to name a few. This plan was needed to give people a fighting chance to combat the negative economic impacts of the pandemic. In fact, not only did it help individuals, but according to Moody’s analytics report “Global Fiscal Policy in the Pandemic” from Feb. 24, “without ARP, the U.S. economy would have come close to suffering a recession in spring 2021.”

So what did this do to our current inflationary rate? While economic stimulus dollars brought by the economic recovery spending did have an impact on rising inflation, it is not as high as one would think. In fact, of the 8% rise in inflation only 2.5% of that could be attributed to economic stimulus spending. In addition, the Treasury Department recently announced that the federal deficit shrank by $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2022 as surging tax revenue and waning pandemic spending helped cut the budget gap in half. This has been seen as a confirmation that the fiscal economic policies have been working.

The United States if far from the only country who is feeling these inflationary effects and to justify otherwise is just plain untrue.

Lisa LaBriola is a principal at Husch Blackwell Strategies and was a Senate Democrat staffer for close to a decade. She served as chief of staff to former Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman and former Senate President Leroy Garcia. Opinions expressed here are her own and do not reflect the opinions of any other organizations.