Price gouging can also be inflation. Inflation is simply measured by how much prices go up. If companies just raise prices to reap more profits because nobody is stopping them, as seems to be the case right now, that's still inflation.

Of course this kind of inflation should be fought by competition, but you have to have companies actually willing to compete on price.

I think OP is saying that the creation of high paying useless job is causing the bulk of the money that exist in the system to not mean much. Which is why we have inflation, because the increase in the amount of money does not scale with the amount of "value". Imagine if government is spending half of the money printed to people staring at walls. This would naturally double the inflation because it requires double the amount of money to produce the same amount of "value".

So the government is pumping money, but is not getting the desired signal, so it pumps more money.