RUTHFULLY YOURS

On the cardinal matter of inflation, Joe Biden is lost, and does not want to be found; he is blind, but does not want to see. Asked on last night’s 60 Minutes what he had to offer in response to the news that “last Tuesday, the annual inflation rate came in at 8.3 percent,” “the stock market nosedived,” and people continued to be “shocked by their grocery bills,” Biden raised his eyebrows and demurred. It’s important, he said defiantly, to “put this in perspective.” That “perspective”? That, per the most recent inflation numbers, the problem is “up just an inch — hardly at all. . . . It hasn’t spiked.” Suppressing a grimace, Biden’s interviewer, Scott Pelley, suggested that a broader “perspective” than the last month might perhaps be more useful to the viewers. “It’s the highest inflation rate, Mr. President, in 40 years,” Pelley said.

’Tis but a scratch!

It is clear from the president’s public pronouncements that he has not yet grasped the scale of the disaster that is unfolding before his eyes. Typically, inflation wreaks its havoc in a slow sequence of discrete stages. First, there is the damage that’s exacted by the rising prices themselves: the sticker shock, the budgeting difficulties, the decreased purchasing power, the devastated savings accounts, the loss of goods and services. Next, there’s the damage that’s done by the attempts to prevent the first set of maladies: the rising interest rates, the increased cost of mortgages, the economic downturn that tends to result from an enforced drop in demand. And, finally, there are the unpredictable long-term ramifications that remind us why it would have been a good idea to keep our fiscal house in order in the first place. Does President Biden still believe, perhaps, that magically, it will be different this time?

Or is he just irresponsible? If he were the “adult” that he so adamantly pretends to be, Biden would have started planning for all this on January 20, 2021 — or even before then. Noting that the federal government had just spent an astonishing $4.1 trillion fighting Covid-19, the new president could have adopted a defensive posture from the start. “All presidents have agendas,” he might have told the public. “But mine has been reshaped by events. My task is to bring us out of the pandemic, to help fix the supply chains, to keep on top of the impending inflation crisis, and to restore our balance sheets to health. That is my calling, and I shall meet it with dispatch.”

This would have disappointed many within Biden’s own party, but it would have caused far less political upheaval than the alternative — which, in addition to our current inflation rate, looks likely to involve interest rates at 5 percent or higher, an average new-mortgage rate of 6 or 7 percent, a recession, and — coming soon to a federal government near you! — a fiscal crisis caused by the impending increase in the cost of repaying the national debt. The last time the United States had to deal with inflation, the federal government’s debt was equivalent to 30 percent of GDP. Today, that number is 130 percent. Maybe we should have thought about this earlier?

Lamentably, Biden did not behave like that adult. Buoyed by a bunch of naïve historians — and inspired by his party’s unexpected control of the Senate — he resolved instead to be “transformative.” Which, in a thoroughly perverse sense, he has been. By prioritizing another two trillion in spending almost as soon as he’d taken his oath, he “turbocharged” the inevitable inflationary spiral and hung a millstone around his own neck. Since then, his conduct has only made that millstone heavier. To his party’s existing two-trillion-dollar behemoth, he has added a deficit-increasing bill, the “Inflation Reduction Act,” whose only relationship with inflation is in its name; an illegal trillion-dollar bailout of student debtors; and an affect that is stuck somewhere in the no man’s land between Lucille Bluth’s detached cluelessness — “it’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost? $10?” — and Hamlet’s perpetual indecision. “Why,” the president might well say to himself in the mirror, when the ghosts grow rowdy and the pressure is on, “I should take it! For it cannot be / But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall.”