The Iditarod Sled Dog Race, a thousand-mile trek through the wilds of Alaska, will take off this Saturday with its smallest field ever. Only 33 hardy mushers will compete for the $50,000 prize.
Lest you question whether America’s pioneer spirit of the rugged men and women who tamed the West is lacking in grit, there may be another reason. With the economy in a bad state, fewer sponsors are stepping up. The prize money may also not have the oomph it once had given the raging inflation under Bidenomics.
Yes, more money chasing fewer goods, the classic definition of inflation, has translated into fewer dogs chasing smaller prizes in the Iditarod.
Dogs have to eat, after all. Defending champ Brent Sass has 58 of them. How has inflation impacted a guy who buys 500 bags of dog food a year? Well, each bag of his high-grade feed is up $30, to $85 a bag, increasing his bill to $42,500, according to the Associated Press. That’s a lot of dog food to keep those cold-weather canines happy and contented. It’s the American family’s supermarket inflation crunch on steroids.
Related: The U.S. Misery Index and Bidenflation’s Impact on Everyday Americans
Maybe it is time Joe Biden addressed that issue around the kitchen table that he is always regaling crowds with in his speeches. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, food inflation is up 10% in the last 12 months. Energy costs are up about 8%, and all costs are up about 6.5%. In January alone, prices rose about half of one percent. With that news, the Democrat administration cheered at how low inflation is now. Tell it to the dogs, Joe. Month by month over the last year, the inflation problem has been compounding and hurting everyone in its path.
Have wages kept up with these numbers? As with the Iditarod, for those running in the rat race, the prize isn’t getting 10% bigger to cover food costs, or even 6.5% bigger for many people. With the Gross Domestic Product growing at about one percent, down from around six percent when Bidenomics took over the economy in January 2021, most workers will continue to trek through the wilds of the workplace just to stay in place. Others will fall behind or end up in a snow drift.
Jack London was a famous early 20th-century nihilist socialist writer. He wrote the Alaskan classic tales White Fang and Call of the Wild following the 1890s gold rush. Were he still with us, he might want to rethink his pet economic ideas. After a century of experimentation, the surest bet in the world is that economies dominated by the government will fail the people.
Bidenomics, with its soft socialism, has created a debt that looms like a thunderhead over the country’s future. Inflation is wiping out savings and forcing families to spend more for less. Meanwhile, in Washington, Democrat special interests get taxpayer dollars shoveled into their coffers with a wide and generous hand. The price we are paying for that is inflation. Unless inflation is stopped without crashing the economy, more than the Iditarod will be going to the dogs.
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