Ask Democrats and Republicans what is to blame for high U.S. inflation, and they would point their fingers at extremely different culprits.

While the White House has identified supply-chain bottlenecks and other pandemic-induced disruptions in the economy for the recent price spike, GOP lawmakers have pinned it on the president's massive spending agenda.

But now researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco are weighing in on the topic – and they say that massive government spending during the coronavirus pandemic has caused U.S. inflation to surge more than in other developed economies. 

"Fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021," wrote Òscar Jordà, Celeste Liu, Fernanda Nechio and Fabián Rivera-Reyes in the San Francisco Fed's weekly Economic Letter.

In the span of just two years, Congress unleashed a torrent of federal money to shield the economy from the coronavirus pandemic, approving roughly $6 trillion in relief measures. Lawmakers approved about $2 trillion under Biden and $4.1 trillion under former President Trump, according to a COVID money tracker published by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington.