Biden goes into cloud cuckoo land on inflation By Monica Showalter
“Biden is still blaming oil companies for the ongoing inflation, as if oil companies themselves were not subject to the higher transport, production, labor, and materials costs of taking oil out of the ground, vowing to punish them with “emergency powers” if they don’t pump more oil to increase supply. He’s begging the Saudis to produce more oil, despite an amazing array of oil resources available in this country, production of which he has largely shut down, as well as the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. He’s also reportedly releasing another round of oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve as if the first huge release had had any effect. It didn’t. He’s blaming Russian president Vladimir Putin. He’s blaming the global economy. He’s blaming Republicans for not approving his latest spend-a-thons.What he’s not doing is addressing inflation itself and the runaway federal spending that created it. It’s as if he doesn’t know, or thinks you don’t know.”
Joe Biden either is stupid or thinks you’re stupid.
Because how else does anyone explain a speech like this, to the supposed working stiffs of the AFL-CIO Tuesday?
Biden, visibly angry: “I don’t want to hear anymore of these lies about reckless spending. We’re changing people’s lives!” pic.twitter.com/0I3OgmIJGD
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 14, 2022
No more lies about reckless spending? Here’s the whole thing:
WATCH LIVE: President Joe Biden speaks at AFL-CIO convention https://t.co/NGF1mEBc8K
— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) June 14, 2022
There’s plenty to dislike about this, from the 1940s proletarian vernacular to the heaping helping of old hokey Irish Catholic gesturing, as if the abortion president were actually Catholic and not a guy who plays one on TV for political benefit.
The worst thing about it though was his incessant mockery of his runaway federal spending, which is the root of the current inflation. He wants more of it. More spending, more inflation, it doesn’t get more obvious than that.
The appropriate response was here:
It’s truly shocking that the President of the United States of America doesn’t know what causes inflation.
— Shawn (@sps59t) June 15, 2022
Because at a time of an 8.6% inflation rate, not seen since Jimmy Carter put on a sweater, it’s pretty obvious Joe Biden doesn’t know what causes inflation. Or he does, but he doesn’t want you to know. He’s mocking the hard reality, effectively admitted by Democrat economists such as Larry Summers, that inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” which was what Milton Friedman posited without compromise.
Biden has spent up a storm already through his largely unnecessary $1.9-trillion pandemic aid package in early 2021, doling out stimulus checks and paying people not to work, forcing the Federal Reserve to print money to pay for it. The Wall Street Journal called it “a tidal wave of federal stimulus.”
Once printed, that money stays in circulation, and prices across the board rise to absorb the excess cash. That’s the verdict of the Federal Reserve itself, which ran a study on the matter and found just that.
A new analysis from the San Francisco Fed finds that U.S. core inflation is higher than other nations – and attributes a part of it to President Biden’s decision to continue unemployment bonuses and government stimulus after the pandemic receded.
Democrat economists who care about their reputations certainly have said so. Here’s one:
Jason Furman, a Democrat who was chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017, said the latest effort tackled the wrong crisis. “We fought the last war,” he said.
Here’s another:
As you may know, early last year Summers sounded the alarm about President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, saying it was the ‘least responsible’ economic policy in 40 years and that it could engender significant and persistent inflation. Turns out Summers, a self-described progressive, was right.
…who’s now pointing out:
“The Fed’s idea used to be that it removed the punchbowl before the party got good,” [former Democrat Treasury secretary Larry] Summer[s] said. “Now, the Fed’s doctrine is that it will only remove the punchbowl after it sees some people staggering around drunk.”
Grosser still, Biden envisions himself as another LBJ, famous for his “war on poverty” and Vietnam war spending:
Mr. Biden likened his ambitions to those of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society during the 1960s. “This is the first time we’ve been able to, since the Johnson administration and maybe even before that, to begin to change the paradigm,” he said after signing the stimulus into law in March.
He apparently didn’t get the memo about what followed from that LBJ spend-a-thon — a ruined presidency for Johnson, which scuppered his bid for a second term, and more to the point, after a small GOP interval characterized by government expansion, the Carter years, with stagflation galore, and broken only by Fed action from tight-money Fed chief Paul Volcker and the entry of the great Ronald Reagan, both of whom reversed the terrible trend.
Not so Old Joe, whose economic brain shut off right about when he was elected senator in 1973.
Biden’s proposing more spending, more subsidies — for prescription drugs, daycare, student loan forgiveness, and a host of other idiocies, plus tax hikes for businesses (to keep their hiring down).
Biden is still blaming oil companies for the ongoing inflation, as if oil companies themselves were not subject to the higher transport, production, labor, and materials costs of taking oil out of the ground, vowing to punish them with “emergency powers” if they don’t pump more oil to increase supply. He’s begging the Saudis to produce more oil, despite an amazing array of oil resources available in this country, production of which he has largely shut down, as well as the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. He’s also reportedly releasing another round of oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve as if the first huge release had had any effect. It didn’t. He’s blaming Russian president Vladimir Putin. He’s blaming the global economy. He’s blaming Republicans for not approving his latest spend-a-thons.
What he’s not doing is addressing inflation itself and the runaway federal spending that created it. It’s as if he doesn’t know, or thinks you don’t know.
Because the flip-side of what Biden is claiming is that he cut the deficit, which right there holds the premise that runaway spending is inflationary.
The hell he has. He’s kept the deficit higher than it would have been as pandemic programs from the government have expired. He’s also increased the national debt.
Here’s lefty FactCheck:
In recent speeches, President Joe Biden has been misleadingly taking credit for cutting federal deficits by historic amounts, though most of the reduction in deficits is the result of expiring emergency pandemic spending. Deficits fell between fiscal year 2020 and 2021 far less than initially projected after Biden added to them with more emergency pandemic and infrastructure spending.
And the deficits under Biden and beyond are projected to remain historically high compared with pre-pandemic levels.
In recent remarks, Biden took credit for cutting the deficit by $350 billion in FY 2021 and claimed his proposed budget for FY 2022 will cut the deficit by $1.3 trillion this year.
The whole thing reeks of a president being out of touch on basic economics and, worse still, unable to do anything but make things worse.
Worse yet, does not have any solutions for it, and therefore things are not going to get better.
And speaking of out of touch, here’s an ironic aside, observed by my old colleague Sean Higgins from my Investor’s Business Daily days:
Pretty sure that Joe Biden must be the first U.S. president ever to vow at the AFL-CIO’s convention that he’s going to build grain silos in the Ukraine. #AFLCIOConv
— Sean Geary Higgins (@SeanGHiggins) June 14, 2022
It’s about par for this sorry presidency. This clown needs an intervention.
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