For Democrats, the pain of inflation is no reason to stop spending

Inflation doesn't matter.

That's the message Democratic leaders are sending as they try to push more than $4 trillion into the economy to build infrastructure, fight climate change and ease the financial cost of child and elder care for families.

President Joe Biden says the 5.4 percent increase in the price of a basket of goods over the 12 months that ended in June is "temporary," and a private White House presentation obtained by NBC News encourages Democratic lawmakers to focus on how Biden's plan "lowers costs for working families rather than how it gets people back to work or helps the economy."

The suggestion is that more federal spending will more than counteract inflation, and the reason for that framing, according to the slide deck, is "polling" from the firm run by Biden's pollster, John Anzalone.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, dismissed concerns about the inflation spike as a function of Republicans' doing "their best" to "gin this up."

But what top Democrats are really saying, at a time when Republicans warn that a record infusion of government spending would hypercharge inflation, is that short-term price spikes aren't relevant to their attempts to expand the role of the federal government.