This is a good example of a desperate man reaching for a life preserver that turns out to be a shark fin.
Joe Biden is in the Middle East, where the Muslims don’t like him or the country he leads very much at all. No American flags greeted Biden as his motorcade made its way through Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s capital. Biden spent the better part of his first year in office blasting Saudi Arabia and its leader, Mohammed bin Salman, for his part in the death of a Washington Post writer.
Now, he’s coming to the Saudis on his knees, begging them to increase oil production.
Being overseas, Biden is relieved because he doesn’t have to listen to the constant carping of the media and even his own party about prices. The day after the consumer price index showed a frightening rise of 9.1 percent over the last year, and the producer price index showed a rise of 11.3 percent in wholesale prices, Biden decided to pretend things weren’t so bad.
The US saw the largest increase in consumer prices in more than 40 years last month, data showed Wednesday. Biden and his top economic advisers fanned out to say that the “unacceptably high” 9.1% annual inflation rate was “out of date” because it did not reflect the easing of gas prices since mid-June.
Fed officials took it differently. Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland President Loretta Mester said she had “not seen any convincing evidence that inflation has turned the corner.” And Fed Board member Christopher Waller called the consumer-price index report a “major league disappointment.”
Is Biden really that delusional, or is he just trying to put lipstick on a pig? America is in pain largely because of this man’s policies and he creates his own metric for consumer prices, believing we should only take the last two weeks to figure inflation for the entire month?
The point isn’t the month-to-month increase in gas prices.
As to Biden’s take on gasoline prices, while they have fallen steadily since mid-June, they remain roughly 46% more expensive on average than a year ago.
And even officials inside the administration acknowledge that any relief from the recent drop in pump prices won’t be enough to counter the rapid increase in rent and housing prices, which rose at an annual rate of 8.2% in the past three months. Food, meantime, has soared more than 10% the past year.
Biden’s laid-back attitude on inflation is getting under the skin of many Democrats — especially those running in swing states.
Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio — a member of the majority party in the House who hopes to join the Senate majority next year — called the latest inflation numbers “awful” in a video posted from the campaign trail: “People are getting absolutely crushed. We need a tax cut now.”
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, also currently in elected office and also looking to join the Senate, said: “We need bold action NOW to make more s— in America, fix our broken supply chains, and take on corporate greed to bring down the cost of everything, for everyone.”
Democrats have begun a stampede away from Biden. Both Ryan and Fetterman snubbed the president on his recent trips to Ohio and Pennsylvania, and refused to appear with him. But history has shown that, try as they might, running away from an unpopular incumbent president never works because the opposition will always find ways to tie a candidate to him.
Biden wants to celebrate a few-cents drop in a gallon of gas while Americans are dealing with double-digit rises in rent? Biden really has to get out of the house more.
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