Like so much background noise in today’s toxic political environment, economic numbers scroll across America’s TV screens showing another period of malaise for Wall Street and the
business sector, often accompanied by talking heads attempting to explain what is occurring with dwindling retirement portfolios.
You’ve seen it -- there’s a bank failure here and there, a Federal Reserve interest rate hike here and there, the inflation rate is still way above where it was x number of years ago and the only visible signs for the average person that something’s terribly wrong is found at the gas station, on restaurant menus and the creeping upward totals on credit card bills.
Those of us who refinanced our mortgages at the beginning of last year have breathed a sigh of relief. For everyone else, reality strikes hard and fast. Inflation is ripping the economic soul out of the nation and still the only solution emanating from Democrat elected leaders is more and more and more government spending to “help people get by.”
Nobody ever learns anything in Washington. Is that a surprise? In a piece titled “Economist Milton Friedman’s long-ago lesson on inflation coming back to bite Biden”, Dave Boyer reported at The Washington Times the other day:
“’Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington can create money,’ Friedman said in a 1978 lecture that’s gained currency again on social media. ‘It’s always and everywhere a result of too much money, of a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. Inflation in the United States is made in Washington and nowhere else.’
“Inflation has soared in the past two years to a peak of 9.1%, sapping families’ purchasing power and spurring higher interest rates that have contributed to recent bank failures. President Biden and his advisers have blamed inflation on the pandemic, supply-chain problems, the war in Ukraine, corporate greed — everything but high spending by his administration and congressional Democrats.
“’Do I take any blame for inflation? No,’ Mr. Biden told reporters last month. ‘It was already there when I got here, man. We were in real economic difficulty. That’s why I don’t.’ Despite the economic turmoil and job losses during the pandemic, inflation stood at a low 1.4% when Mr. Biden came into office. It has averaged 6.2% over the two years of his presidency. Washington has thrown several trillion dollars into the economy to help Americans and businesses recover from the pandemic. The first aid package, the $2 trillion CARES Act, was signed by President Trump in March 2020.”
As the final sentence not-so-thinly implies, yes, former president Trump and the congressional Republicans who went along with the executive’s calls for massive spending to try and stay ahead of a novel and invisible virus are nearly as responsible as Biden for the inflation mess we have today. If there’s such a thing as a Washington “UniParty” for dumping taxpayer money – or more accurately, treasury borrowed cash – onto the Russia/Ukraine war, then the “UniParty” comes together once more to spend, spend, spend whenever the pols feel there’s a justification for it.
Remember the panic refrain? “People are dropping like flies in Italy! There’s a cruise ship with COVID cases! Someone tested positive for the virus at the local elementary school! Models show two million will die in the U.S. alone! It came from a mutated and diseased pangolin in Wuhan! Keep people away from each other!”
I don’t have a degree in economics, but it wasn’t difficult to see what would result from the government’s dictate to shut everyone down (except for those deemed “essential”, henceforth deemed “heroes” just for going to work) and dip into Uncle Sam’s pockets to pay folks for the time that they weren’t doing something productive. Many, many businesses (such as restaurants) couldn’t sustain the closures, because once they reopened, much of their workforce didn’t return. But other companies with big bureaucracies did quite well!
Inflation is kind of like a plague all to itself. One day everyone’s running around happy and healthy and working, the next day prices jump and suddenly, those same humans are complaining about how they can’t afford to buy food anymore. To paraphrase the caddy (Romeo) in the movie Tin Cup, “[Inflation] is like a virus. It just shows up.”
Of course, Joe Biden deflects responsibility for inflation partially because he’s a conditioned liar, and partly because he doesn’t understand it. Politicians are about as inflation-proof as anyone in the country. They’re like a Costco food court, where the prices haven’t increased in… well beyond my memory. You can still get a huge slice of pizza for two bucks there, and a quarter-pound hot dog and a soda will only set you back a buck fifty at the box discount chain.
For the political class, they simply assign the inflation bug onto other things. Like a crutch that holds up a star athlete after his umpteenth surgery on his legs and knees, senile president Joe Biden has returned time and again to the COVID pseudo-pandemic as the culprit for why this or that goes wrong in his administration. Much was written earlier this month when Americans passed the third anniversary of the government’s order for mass lockdowns as the purported weapon to expunge the mysterious Chinese Communist Party (CCP, or Wuhan, if you prefer) virus and thus, afterwards, allow everyone within the confines of the United States to come out from hiding like munchkins (in The Wizard of Oz) in munchkin land because the “wicked witch” would have been slain.
Illegal aliens get a pass under the Biden administration’s lax border policies, however!
“Fifteen days to stop the spread” became months and then a half a year and then a year and then two years, etc… yet still the Biden administration kept the COVID topic on the front burners so as to keep the terrified percentage of the citizenry subdued and clawing at the feet of the federal authorities for just that much longer. President Biden himself made a spectacle out of receiving the booster shot, reserving establishment media time to glorify his lack of physical reaction to receiving another poke.
Where was the breaking point? When was the moment when decent people stopped believing the hype and fear and declared to themselves that they weren’t going to take it any longer? Meanwhile, the spending continued, and so did the inflation.
The COVID nonsense together with other nonsensical Biden policies like cancelling the Keystone pipeline and bringing new energy exploration to a virtual standstill predictably resulted in energy prices doubling. While Biden bragged about the Democrat-sponsored giveaway programs -- “Yay! Free Money!” -- that his party was responsible for passing, who among us failed to recognize that most of the new dough was merely going to pay the difference for stuff that had heretofore been considerably cheaper?
Wow, there’s a new check from the Federal Treasury! Why didn’t they just send it in liquid form at 87 octane so we could pour it straight into the gas tank? Or how about all those subsidies for electric vehicles? They’re the ones with a special place on the new car lot, right? You can recognize them – they don’t have grills! They aren’t air cooled like those inane gasoline or diesel engines!
It makes sense -- didn’t Henry Ford invent the automobile using an internal combustion engine? Blame him for climate change! Remove the Ford name from buildings and monuments! I’m surprised there hasn’t been some leftwing inspired organization which sought to retroactively attribute the supposedly warming planet to the fools who first built a motor that could fire on gasoline.
Or, why stop there? Weren’t locomotives powered by burning wood and coal? Ever seen one of those old-time movies where the train engine emits a towering cloud of black smoke? Blame inflation on the robber barons!
Senile Joe Biden is probably so old he thinks he was around when these things were invented. Heck, if it were up to Biden, he’d blame the ancients for the onset of climate change because they domesticated animals that poop a lot and thus create methane, which is a warming gas, isn’t it?
As far as I can tell, liberals haven’t ascribed inflation on “climate change”, but a connection can’t be far behind. After all, if the answer to the “climate change” dilemma is hundreds of billions of dollars of spending for so-called “clean” energy subsidies, then it also follows that the correction needed for rising prices is also more spending to make everything else affordable so people can purchase solar panels for their roof.
Realistically speaking, Joe Biden can’t accept blame for inflation because to do so would be political suicide. But at the same time, there’s got to be a cutting off mark for assigning everything that ever goes wrong to the previous administration – or to COVID. No one talks about the pandemic any longer, except the politicians and the media.
It could be said that legislators aren’t elected to save money, so it’s only natural for them – especially Democrats – to believe spending is the only solution to any problem. Milton Friedman was right – government, and government alone, merits blame for inflation. Until the American people realize it, and vote it out, then we’re only getting what we bargained for.
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