“Hi! I’m Joe Biden, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help!”
This is a slight twist on Ronald Reagan’s famous maxim, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help,” but the meaning is just the same. The nightmarish notion of Joe Biden showing up at your front door and proffering “help” for anything of consequence is truly terrifying.
Should Biden come to my house and offer “help”, I’ll hand him a pair of shears and direct him to trim the overgrowth at the rear of the property. Then again, thinking about it, he’d probably cut up our flowers and shrubs rather than the natural greenery we don’t want. I probably should just tell him, “Thanks, but no thanks” and send him on his way. Or, possibly make a call to the homeowner’s association to report a solicitor going door-to-door (which thankfully isn’t allowed here) and have security remove him.
Of course, being the Democrat that he is, Joe believes that good intentions (at least according to him) equate to “helping” American citizens enjoy a better life. In their own twisted estimations, Democrats think banning firearms, suppressing domestic industries to combat “climate change”, federalizing elections, codifying abortion on the national level and doling out welfare checks by the trillions is somehow good for the economy and “helps” in the big picture.
Republicans and Democrats can (somewhat) agree to disagree on most of these subjects, but there’s no debating that Biden’s proposed fixes for out-of-control inflation will only make things worse, not “help” lower prices. No one gives Biden credit for a vast intellect, but deep down, even he must realize that stifling oil and gas drilling has resulted in prices going up, up, up.
The sorry malaise revealed itself politically in Biden’s poll numbers and approval ratings scraping the bottom of the barrel, figuratively speaking. Senile Joe’s spent a lot of time lately trying to squelch the bleeding -- and it isn’t working. He’s so desperate to change impressions that he even sent an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal trying to move the needle back in his direction where inflation is concerned. Biden wrote at The WSJ that his plan has three parts:
“First, the Federal Reserve has a primary responsibility to control inflation. My predecessor demeaned the Fed, and past presidents have sought to influence its decisions inappropriately during periods of elevated inflation. I won’t do this. I have appointed highly qualified people from both parties to lead that institution. I agree with their assessment that fighting inflation is our top economic challenge right now.”
As with everything else, senile Joe is a little late to the party here. The Fed, through quantitative easing, has already ramped up the money supply so high that it will be very difficult to rein in inflation. You can’t un-ring a bell and dumping trillions of unsupported cash into the economy will show up in ways that couldn’t be anticipated beforehand. Americans see it whenever they go to the store or to the gas station.
Not “interfering” with the FED’s actions won’t earn Biden a pass here. He’s already done more than enough to set the inflation avalanche in motion. Staying out of the way now won’t alleviate the pain of those in its path. We’d best prepare our shovels to dig out from being buried by the flow.
Senile Joe went on, “Second, we need to take every practical step to make things more affordable for families during this moment of economic uncertainty—and to boost the productive capacity of our economy over time. The price at the pump is elevated in large part because Russian oil, gas and refining capacity are off the market. We can’t let up on our global effort to punish Mr. Putin for what he’s done, and we must mitigate these effects for American consumers. That is why I led the largest release from global oil reserves in history. Congress could help right away by passing clean energy tax credits and investments that I have proposed. A dozen CEOs of America’s largest utility companies told me earlier this year that my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500 and accelerate our transition from energy produced by autocrats...” Huh? The CEO’s Joe referenced must be Democrats. Since the vast majority of American energy is still realized through burning fossil fuels, how is it possible to reduce bills by cutting supply of what, pardon the expression, drives the economy? Biden must feel boxed in a corner with this green energy nonsense, so politically speaking, he can’t and won’t let it go. But ask your regular consumer whether he or she would be satisfied with tax credits and/or federal subsidies for windmills and solar panels and ethanol instead of just pumping more oil out of the ground, and he'll tell you to go catch a slow boat to China.
Even if Biden were correct, which he’s not, utility bills wouldn’t be reduced now, next year, or anytime soon by mass emphasis on “green energy”. Benefits twenty years down the line won’t “help” consumers pay for stuff in 2022. Here, again, Biden doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.
In his piece, senile Joe also wrote that Democrats would fix the supply chain, build more housing and lower prescription drug prices by empowering Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. This was standard Democrat-speak for more government price controls and useless interference in the free market. He also shifted responsibility to Congress for inaction on his ideas (which basically singles out Senator Joe Manchin). Do we want Joe Biden’s “help” here? No thanks.
Biden lays out the third part of his plan: “Third, we need to keep reducing the federal deficit, which will help ease price pressures. Last week the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficit will fall by $1.7 trillion this year—the largest reduction in history. That will leave the deficit as a share of the economy lower than prepandemic levels and lower than CBO projected for this year before the American Rescue Plan passed. This deficit progress wasn’t preordained. In addition to winding down emergency programs responsibly, about half the reduction is driven by an increase in revenue—as my economic policies powered a rapid recovery.”
Yet we STILL need more taxes and more “help”, right, Joe? Yeah, sure. Joe Biden did that… isn’t there a sticker that mocks him claiming the same thing?
Not so astonishingly, Biden claims credit for “reducing the deficit” from the previous years, which not-so-loosely translated means, the government is spending slightly less than it was during the wanton appropriations binge during the COVID pandemic. While it may be true that the feds aren’t engaging in the splurging orgy that they were two years ago -- and last year, thanks to the $1.9 trillion, party-line vote “relief” bill -- the budget is still not even close to balancing.
Tax receipts are up, too, largely thanks to the economic growth fostered by Donald Trump and the Republicans’ 2017 tax reform package which cut rates but also scaled back big deductions for wealthy taxpayers, such as SALT (Capping deductions on one’s federal tax return for state and local taxes paid). Incidentally, Democrats, in their various Build Back (More) Better proposals, wanted to eliminate the SALT caps for big blue state residents. What a bunch of hypocrites.
Predictably, one of the many things Biden neglected to mention is the effect that paying higher interest rates to finance the enormous national debt will have on the annual budget. Every percentage point higher in interest adds up quickly when you’re servicing $30+ trillion that you’ve borrowed from the FED, China, taxpayers, whomever. How much will it cost in interest to finance what was borrowed a decade ago?
Is there anyone within the Democrat party who’s going to go to senile Joe and tell him that his arguments and numbers don’t add up? Not to mention, what about the revenues lost from the senseless reductions in energy production? Democrats never credit the significant tax collections that are generated from oil, gas and coal development. While it may not be possible to drill our way out of government deficits, every bit counts. God gifted the United States with the capability to not only achieve energy independence, but also to export the fuels to a thirsty global market. There’s money in the ground. But all Joe Biden talks about is leaving it there so Americans will be stuck with windmill eyesores and unreliable solar panel fields that endanger birds and take up huge tracts of land.
As I’ve argued many times, boosting energy prices makes everything more expensive. Farmers don’t have electric tractors and combines and there aren’t “green energy” semi-trucks to transport the harvest, either. Ever heard of an electric train that wasn’t set up on a table in your living room?
Further, we have not yet begun to see the full effects of the inflation to come. Reports are emerging that food prices will increase dramatically when farmers harvest their crops and send them to market. In other words, the more they’re paying for fertilizer now to grow the same amount of grain or feed their livestock as the year before, the more they’ll ask for when they bring the crops for sale.
What comes around goes around. Or as the old saying goes, “Pay me now or pay me later.”
And what about all the personal credit card debt Americans are accumulating in trying to deal with the skyrocketing prices? Interest rate hikes will be found here, too, which will compound the already serious problem.
It’s clear by his repeated excuses and denials of culpability that Joe Biden neither understands what’s causing inflation nor how to deal with it. Government “help” has already done enough damage and every extra tidbit of tinkering with the free market will exacerbate the problem. Democrats brought the political anger upon themselves by elevating a senile dunce to the presidency.
They sowed the mess; now let them reap the consequences.
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