To kill the high inflation of the 1970s, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker pushed the federal funds rate to unprecedented levels (20 percent at its peak), inducing the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. Real GDP fell by about 2 percent in 1982, and unemployment reached nearly 10 percent that year. Politicians from both political parties expressed outrage. … Although today Volcker is widely credited with having slain double-digit inflation, he was widely criticized (even reviled) at the time he did it.

… After all, given that he was at least partly – and perhaps mainly – responsible for driving unemployment to its highest rate in nearly a half-century, his odds of winning reelection would have been long indeed. But Volcker, like all Fed chairman, was a presidential appointee who could not be fired until the end of his fourteen-year term as a Fed governor.

Combating the inflation can be really painful.