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March 12, 2022

Biden goes bonkers over inflation

By Monica Showalter

Joe Biden should be hopping mad about inflation, which rolled in at 7.9% and is destroying the purchasing power, wage gains, and savings of the citizenry even as he touts good economic times in his speeches.

Instead, he's going bonkers over the voter reaction to inflation, not the inflation itself.

"I'm sick of this stuff!" he hollered.  "We have to talk about it because the American people think the reason for inflation is the government spending more money.  Simply.  Not.  True."

But of course, it is perfectly true.  He's wallowing in denial about it and now thinks he can yell his way into making Americans think differently. 

In his wretched King Lear-like rant, brimming with rage and self-pity, Biden whimpered that Americans were just poor simpleton peasants who don't understand inflation and don't give Joe and all his "achievements" the credit they deserve:

Yes, they do, Joe. Yes, they do.

What do we make of this crazed rant against reality?  PJMedia's Robert Spencer, for one, thinks it could be the dementia kicking in.

What's happening to the American economy is entirely the fault of the old man who is shouting about how sick and tired he is of people saying it's his fault and of the bright young Leftists with whom he has filled his administration and who are anxious to seize as much of the fruit of the labors of the American people as they can, so as to finance their various utopian boondoggles. It is perhaps a symptom of the deep crisis in American society, or at least of the malignant forces that are operating in America today, that a man so utterly frivolous and irresponsible as Joe Biden would become president and do so in his dotage, bereft of the glib and smiling veneer he put on his dishonest presentations in earlier days. All that is left of him now is the shouting.

From a practical perspective, this also means that the inflation problem isn't going to be solved even if Biden or his Fed appointees had any recognition about what it takes to do it.  They're all in denial.  The first step to solving a problem is to define it, and these people haven't defined it.  The Fed has been rationalizing the inflation numbers as a problem of "inflation expectations" rather than inflation, and, well, there's an expectation right there, but it doesn't explain the root of what's happening.  Biden actually thinks Putin did it.

The problem, of course, is money-printing, by the Federal Reserve, done to finance all of Joe's big-spending government pork programs.

Here's a Feb. 25 tweet from the man who knows more about inflation than anyone, Johns Hopkins University professor of economics Steve Hanke, showing the proof of it:

Increase your money supply, increase your inflation, this isn't hard to understand. Power Line has some excellent charts showing it for those who prefer pictures. In Hanke's WSJ essay last year -- which correctly forecasted this inflation picture today -- he and economist John Greenwood explained that the "monetary bathtub is overflowing." 

Update: Here is their latest, which ran in the Wall Street Journal Friday.

Oil prices, which some incorrectly see as the root of the controversy, are just one part of the inflation basket that creates the big inflation number -- the actual root of the problem is the money itself, the thing that measures the value. Plenty of places around the world pay higher energy prices than we do, but sport either no or low inflation, and the problem actually evens itself out without spreading through the economy. But when money has no place to go, no place to serve as a productive vehicle, because there is too much of it floating around -- then inflation hits everything. Inflation is the backwash of money with no place to go -- the monetary bathtub flowing over, or given the worthlessness of these government spending programs, the monetary toilet overflowing.

The 7.9% inflation printout that Biden is now trying to pin on Putin is a February year-over-year number, meaning, Putin's activity couldn't have influenced it even if such a thing were possible.

"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon," as economics giant Milton Friedman laid it out ahead of the mighty Reagan-era boom that put paid to the Carter stagflation era.

But at least Jimmy Carter, with his sweaters and small is beautiful rhetoric, knew there was an inflation problem. Joe doesn't. 

"Milton Friedman isn't running the show anymore," Biden declared as recently as 2020 and, well, yeah, with the February report showing 7.9% year-over-year, we know.

This is what the U.S. looks like without Milton Friedman running the show anymore.

For Joe, the problem is the reaction to the inflation, not the inflation itself. Apparently, voters are supposed to deny it, blame producers, call it a good thing, or do what Biden does, which is Blame Putin.

Putin himself shot that one down:

"Supplies of Russian oil, say, to the American market do not exceed 3%. This is a negligible amount. And their prices are growing. We have absolutely nothing to do with it," he said on Thursday. "They just hide behind these decisions in order to deceive once again their own population."

And Putin knew what the problem was, too — two months earlier (can't find the direct link, but I saw it), Putin said the Fed would need to stop its money-printing to finance Joe's monster expansion of government and its huge handouts.  RT itself, the Russian state-funded propaganda outlet, correctly pointed to money-printing in its analysis, too.  Russia, after all, has been through the mill on inflation over the past three decades, and Putin and the locals, regardless of what they think about other things, know where that comes from.

Biden's intemperate reaction to inflation as it hits him in the face and causes his poll numbers to plummet could be solved — over the long term, unfortunately — by cutting government spending, and by going the fiscal discipline route.  He could even raise taxes or borrow money to accomplish the same thing, although borrowing would be at a premium, as the dollar is devaluing, and tax hikes would have to be very high.  Instead, he doubles down on expanding government, printing the money, spending the cash, and trying to grow more powerful, as AT deputy editor Andrea Widburg noted in this fine piece citing Tucker Carlson's observations here.  He could blame a series of past presidents for it, a rare legitimate chance to take a shot at President Trump among a string of others, all of whom expanded government, but Putin works better with the focus groups, right, Joe? 

It doesn't mesh with reality, and Joe doesn't know what to do about it.  So he rages, like a toddler or a demented person, trying to beat back the sea with a hammer.  It's the sorriest display ever of his failing mind.

Image: Screen shot from video shared on Twitter.

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