Joe Biden's number one political problem is high prices. There are many reasons for the price increases that we've seen in the last three-and-a-half years, and most of them originate with politics.
It was politics and fear that shut the economy down in 2020. The fear came because no one knew how severe the COVID-19 pandemic was. That wouldn't be known for many months. However, it was a political decision to keep the economy shut in blue states. Democrats saw an opportunity to score political points against Trump and the Republicans by contrasting their "scientific" approach to the pandemic with the Republicans' more open approach.
Fear was used as a political weapon. And it kept the economy under wraps far longer than it should have been.
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) was a measure that both parties widely supported. The $2.7 trillion bill made sense to give the economy a boost after the shutdowns.
But when Biden came into office, the shackles on spending came off and almost $4 trillion in cash payments to businesses and people was handed out. It was a classic Keynesian case of too much cash chasing too few goods. Prices skyrocketed.
This is almost 100% on Joe Biden. That spending was a payoff to his supporters in the unions, the tech industry, and other Democratic interest groups.
Now Biden's radical left supporters are clamoring for Biden to blame "greedy corporations" for the continuation of high prices. According to the economic simpletons, prices should now fall back to where they were in 2020 before the pandemic.
But Biden, whose knowledge of economics isn't much better than the simpletons, is resisting the populist call to blame corporations for the mess he made.
"The Biden campaign has not focused its television or online advertisements on messages berating companies for high prices, unlike Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who have made the issue a centerpiece of their campaigns," reports the New York Times.
Now, some progressives are urging Mr. Biden to follow those senators’ lead and make “greedflation,” as they call it, a driving theme of his re-election bid. They say that taking the fight to big business could bolster the broader Main Street vs. Wall Street argument he is pursuing against former President Donald J. Trump, particularly with the working-class voters of color Mr. Biden needs to motivate. And they believe polls show voters are primed to hear the president condemn big corporations in more forceful terms.
“It’s a winning message for Democrats,” said April Verrett, the president of the Service Employees International Union, which is knocking on doors in battleground states as part of a $200 million voter-turnout operation. “And clearly Bob Casey, who’s doing better in the polls than the president, is proving that it’s the winning message.”
Casey hasn't won yet, so how much of a "winning" strategy it is to blame corporations for the mess that even average Americans know Biden is responsible for doesn't add up.
Besides, Republicans have already cornered the market on identifying the problem; it's called "Bidenflation."
“We’re taking on corporate greed to bring down the price of gas, food, and rent, eliminating junk fees,” Biden told a crowd of 1,000 supporters in Philadelphia last week. It's no accident that Biden's words are falling on deaf ears.
Biden has as much to do with bringing down the price of gas at the pump as the dinosaurs. And they died out 65 million years ago. Food and rent are not coming down at all. They have risen 25% since 2020.
But in politics, what isn't necessarily true can sometimes be a political winner. And that's what the left is demanding of Biden; that he take their advice as an article of faith and use voters' natural distrust of big companies to gain ground, especially in the Rust Belt.
“President Biden has quite a bit of latitude here to put the blame where it belongs and he should not be shy about voicing it,” said Julián Castro, the former Housing and Urban Development secretary. “The alternative is that they’re going to blame you.”
And that's exactly what's happening.
