Washington (AP) — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has assured Congress that the recent surge in inflation has been monitored very carefully by the Biden administration, but reiterated that any increase would be temporary.

Yellen, who testified to Biden’s $ 6 trillion budget at the Senate Finance Committee, recently received a 5% rise in consumer prices from Republicans to May, the biggest surge since 2008. I was asked about the sharp rise in inflation.

Yellen said no one wanted to relive the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, and the government took recent inflation “very seriously.” However, she said she still believes that rising prices reflect temporary factors associated with the resumption of the economy after a long outage due to a pandemic.

“Most economists believe that the current surge in inflation reflects the difficulty of reopening a closed economy,” Yellen said of the buying patterns and bottlenecks that caused the shortfall. He pointed out that there was a big change.

Yellen said prices plummeted when the pandemic broke out more than a year ago, especially in the service industry, such as airlines and hotels.Now that the country has reopened, those snoops are back to a more normal level, “she said.

“We believe our economy is on track to return to more normal operations,” Yellen said. So far, she said consumers and businesses’ expectations for future inflation are firmly fixed. It will mitigate the threat of some sort of wage price spiral as seen in the 1970s.

Yellen also assures the Commission that the Treasury, which oversees the Internal Revenue Service, is working to determine how information about taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans was obtained by ProPublica. did.

A non-profit research journalism organization reported that the wealthiest Americans paid less taxes than regular workers — an average of 15.8% of adjusted gross income.

Senator John Thune of South Dakota called last week’s report “one of the most widespread violations in history” of government data that undermines American confidence in the IRS.

Mr Yellen said the case was considered a very serious situation and the Treasury referred the matter to the Justice Department and the Treasury Department’s tax director.

“Protecting taxpayer data is absolutely a top priority,” Yellen said. “If there is an action we should take to strengthen the protection of this information, you … have my word that we do.”

Yellen said in her testimony on Biden’s budget that the government is trying to overcome decades of harmful economic trends that have contributed to increasing income inequality.

“These destructive forces-differences in wages and geographic regions, reduced labor force participation, rising climate change, sustained racial inequality-all combined to bring tens of millions of Americans together. An economy that is blocked from our prosperous areas, “Yellen said.