Smoke, mirrors, and outright lies: that’s been Joe Biden’s strategy to fight the inflation that’s emptying the American people’s wallets and eating away at Americans’ standard of living.
Biden’s excuses for inflation have evolved over the last few months. Remember when fuel inflation was the fault of the oil companies? Now that the price is dropping — largely because of an increased supply due to weaker economic activity — we haven’t heard many attempts to demonize the evil oil companies.
And whatever happened to inflation being the fault of retailers? I can also remember when Putin was the number one culprit for inflation. And big business too.
And remember when the reason your food bill was so high was because of greedy food processing companies? We don’t hear Biden grousing much about that anymore. Perhaps he realized that his blaming others for problems he created wasn’t working politically as well as he had hoped.
Biden’s new strategy is to pretend inflation is getting better. He issued a statement patting himself on the back for doing such a great job bringing down prices.
Today’s data show more progress in bringing global inflation down in the US economy. Overall, prices have been essentially flat in our country these last two months: that is welcome news for American families, with more work still to do. Gas prices are down an average of $1.30 a gallon since the beginning of the summer. This month, we saw some price increases slow from the month before at the grocery store. And real wages went up again for a second month in a row, giving hard-working families a little breathing room.
It will take more time and resolve to bring inflation down, which is why we passed the Inflation Reduction Act to lower the cost of healthcare, prescription drugs and energy. And my economic plan is showing that, as we bring prices down, we are creating good paying jobs and bringing manufacturing back to America.
Yes, fuel prices are down, but they’re still $1.30 higher than when Biden took office. And all indications point to gas prices going up again before the end of the year.
But it’s food prices that are the biggest worry. And the White House doesn’t appear to have a clue about how to bring them down.
“The majority of those federal programs and funds [in the IRA] are targeted at conservation, you know, potentially increasing conservation efforts around the country,” said Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economics professor at Kansas State University. “That’s not the same as increasing production, and that’s relevant for the food price discussion because I haven’t seen anything that’s really about increasing production volume. [And] that would be one mechanism, obviously, to reduce food prices if we increased the volume produced.”
Tonsor added that efforts to break up market consolidation could lower prices, but only “if things get nudged towards more competitive behavior without losing supply-side economies of scale … [and] I think that’s far from certain in most categories.”
Biden isn’t interested in reforming anything. It’s all smoke and mirrors and bald-faced lies, as I mentioned.
The White House report also repeatedly, and breathlessly, takes credit for an economic recovery that resulted overwhelmingly from the pandemic receding rather than any presidential policy. The “key accomplishment” of creating 9.7 million jobs stems mostly from the economy reopening following the pandemic. The “decline of more than $1.20 in gas prices this summer” of course fails to mention the $2.61 price rise that had occurred earlier under Biden.
In what is certainly news to Republicans, as well as America’s governors, mayors and public health officials, the report claims that “The Biden-Harris Administration also took decisive action to open America’s schools safely.”
There seem to be few positive developments in America for which the president will not demand full credit.
The Federal Reserve isn’t at all sure that raising interest rates will tame inflation. In the early 1980s when Fed chair Paul Volker began to jack up interest rates to a nearly unbearable level, only a huge cut in federal spending drove prices down as quickly as they dropped.
Biden and the Democrats are still spending like drunken sailors, adding $4.8 trillion in spending just since Biden took office with the promise of more on the way. The Fed can’t do this alone. Raising rates will only take us so far. Congress has to restrain federal spending as well.
If they don’t, the Fed will simply jack up interest rates to 1980 levels (21%) and bring about a brutal economic downturn. No one wants that. Least of all a president running for re-election in 2024.
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