It's not just fiscal policy; there's a wide range of government actions that influence prices. Excessive regulation pushes up prices every bit as much as excess government spending.
I remember that when I was at Statistics Canada in 1980, we were grappling with trying to understand inflation and how to bring it down. One of the innovations we brought about was that we introduced something called the regulated price index for the CPI. We looked at that portion of the CPI that was controlled by government directly, through taxation, through rent controls or through controlled marketing boards.
It turns out that one of the problems in bringing down inflation in the early 1980s was that while the market portion of the CPI was coming down rapidly, the regulated, government-controlled portion of inflation was very slow to come down. That might be something worth looking at again in the current context.
I suspect we're seeing an adjustment in a lot of the market parts of the economy, but in a lot of the government-controlled economy, price increases are just rolling along without any awareness of the impact this is having on ordinary people.