How Many Inflation Warnings Did Biden Ignore? A Democratic pollster reportedly offered better analysis than Powell and Yellen. James Freeman
New York Times readers may be puzzled by a headline on the newspaper’s website this week: “Biden Received Early Warnings That Immigration and Inflation Could Erode His Support”. Is this news? Especially on inflation, in 2021 it was striking that some prominent members of the Obama economic team were joining conservatives in urging the President not to ignite his desired bonfire of federal spending. But this week’s Times dispatch is nevertheless useful in attempting to understand the failures that haunt the Biden presidency.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns report in the Times:
President Biden enjoyed high approval among Americans in the early months of his presidency . . . But privately Mr. Biden’s lead pollster was already sounding the alarm that even with the early successes, certain gathering threats could sink support for the president and his party.
“Immigration is a growing vulnerability for the president,” John Anzalone and his team warned in a package of confidential polling, voter surveys and recommendations compiled for the White House. “Voters do not feel he has a plan to address the situation on the border, and it is starting to take a toll.”
Within a month, there was another stark warning. “Nearly nine in 10 registered voters are also concerned about increasing inflation,” said another memo obtained by The New York Times.
Since we’re talking about the Times, this column must issue the standard cautions against believing reports based on anonymous sources. According to this week’s report:
Mr. Anzalone declined to comment. The documents were obtained from three people in the administration who had access to the polling data. They asked for anonymity because of the confidential and sensitive nature of the documents.
Assuming the report is legitimate, the pollster seems to have offered useful analysis that Mr. Biden ignored. Specifically—and this should not have come as a shock—voters don’t like chaos at the border, in the streets, or in the marketplace. They tend to oppose lawlessness and favor sound money. The Timesfolk report that one Anzalone memo warned that crime was becoming a bigger voter concern than coronavirus. The Times story adds:
. . . “The economy and inflation continue to dominate what is on the minds of voters—and their attitudes keep getting worse, which continues to impact the president’s job rating on the economy negatively,” one of the memos said. “And we should not expect positive movement in the short or mid-term as voters are not just feeling sour about the economy and inflation now, but voters also feel things are moving in the wrong direction for the future.”
Proving that miracles never cease, Mr. Biden seems to have found that rarest of creatures—an opinion polling expert who makes accurate calls. But based on White House policy choices one can only conclude that the President didn’t believe him!
If only Mr. Biden had listened. Dan Balz, Emily Guskin and Scott Clement now report on the latest Washington Post/ABC survey, which the polling website FiveThirtyEight claims is among the most accurate. The Post reporters write:
More than 9 in 10 Americans say they are concerned, at minimum, about the rate of inflation, which has been at a 40-year high in recent months. That includes 44 percent who categorize themselves as “upset.”
They have every right to be upset, and judging by the Post/ABC survey results voters seem to be appropriately assigning accountability. The Post reporters note:
Biden’s worst ratings come on the dominant issue of inflation, with 68 percent saying they disapprove compared with 28 percent who give him positive marks. The president is notably weak on this issue among independents, who could hold the key to the outcome in many contested House and Senate races in November. Just over 1 in 5 independents, 22 percent, say they approve of how Biden has been dealing with rising prices.
What is especially frustrating is that Mr. Anzalone was not the only one trying to steer Mr. Biden off his reckless course. Yet with a series of key appointments, the President has staffed the top economic policy slots in Washington with people who shared a bizarre determination to ignore the lessons of our economic and financial history. Jim Tankersley and Jeanna Smialek reported in the New York Times in February of 2021:
Presidents who find themselves digging out of recessions have long heeded the warnings of inflation-obsessed economists, who fear that acting aggressively to stimulate a struggling economy will bring a return of the monstrous price increases that plagued the nation in the 1970s.
Now, as President Biden presses ahead with plans for a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, he and his top economic advisers are brushing those warnings aside, as is the Federal Reserve under Chair Jerome H. Powell.
What Americans would give now for a few inflation-obsessed economists! That early 2021 Times report continued:
Democrats in the House plan to spend this week finalizing Mr. Biden’s plan to pump nearly $2 trillion into the economy, including direct checks to Americans and more generous unemployment benefits . . .
The Fed and the administration are staying the course despite a growing outcry from some economists across the political spectrum, including Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary and top adviser in the Clinton and Obama administrations, who say Mr. Biden’s plans could stir up a whirlwind of rising prices.
No one better embodies the sudden break from decades of worry over inflation—in Washington and elite circles of economics—than Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair and current Treasury secretary . . .
“I have spent many years studying inflation and worrying about inflation,” Ms. Yellen told CNN earlier this month. “But we face a huge economic challenge here and tremendous suffering in the country. We have got to address that. That’s the biggest risk.”
What would we do without experts? Ms. Yellen seems to have believed the Biden fantasy that the country was an economic shambles when he took office, even though in the first quarter of 2021 the U.S. economy grew at better than a 6% real rate. This column warned in January of 2021:
By any reasonable measure, the economy is not in need of a “rescue.” So in a spirit of unity, how can sensible Democrats explain to President Joe Biden that his spending plans may be unnecessary, irrelevant to the issues at hand and dangerous for an economy in which federal debt now exceeds GDP?
In March of last year, this column observed:
Since last March politicians have somehow managed to get away with shutting down heavily indebted economies and then borrowing and printing money as a substitute. Now many are determined to ignore nearly all of human history prior to 2008 and conclude that there really are no limits to the ability of a government treasury to issue debt, much of which is later purchased by another arm of government with money created out of thin air.
Speaking of the latter, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve still isn’t worried about inflation, nor is the Treasury secretary, even as their political colleagues in Washington engage in an historic bidding war for discretionary items that are not even remotely related to the Covid crisis.
Now comes the political reckoning.
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