In one of the lead letters in the Wall Street Journal on 12/20/21 (print edition on 12/21/21), John Tamny closes with the following statement:

The state of the consumer-price index is a political phenomenon born of panic, not an inflationary story of dollar-price decline.

I assume that by “dollar-price decline,” Tamny means a decline in the value of the dollar; otherwise it wouldn’t be an “inflationary story.” But Tamny doesn’t deny that consumer prices have risen a lot. Another way of saying that consumer prices have risen a lot is that the value of the dollar has fallen.

So the CPI increase is a story of dollar-price decline.

Does anyone know any interpretation of Tamny’s sentence that both fits the recent data and is not contradictory?

Note: Lawrence H. White, “Inflation,” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, is still one of the best overall concise treatments of inflation.