You may have seen Joe Biden’s pathetic blame game tweet this week where he wrote “Let’s be absolutely clear about why prices are high right now: COVID and Vladimir Putin.”
Really? It doesn’t have anything to do with the Federal Reserve’s low rates or the federal government’s massive spending? It doesn’t have anything to do with Biden’s restrictions on oil and gas drilling and transportation?
Here’s Biden’s tweet in full:
I know that families are still struggling with higher prices. I grew up in a family where if the price of gas went up, we felt it.
Let’s be absolutely clear about why prices are high right now: COVID and Vladimir Putin.
— President Biden (@POTUS) April 20, 2022
Brad Palumbo, Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education, writes of Biden’s blame game in Newsweek:
First things first: The Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, has printed trillions of new dollars out of thin air since the pandemic began. This was supposed to help the economy, but the only thing it really “stimulated” was inflation, because when more dollars chase the same amount of goods, prices inevitably rise.
While this is not in Biden’s direct control, President Biden has done nothing to urge the Federal Reserve to change courses. In fact, he just recently re-nominated Fed Chair Jerome Powell and praised his leadership—despite Powell having overseen this very disastrous outcome. And Biden’s other Fed nominees have been weak on this issue as well, meaning that while he didn’t cause it, he hasn’t helped.
Then there’s the unprecedented deficit spending. Here, too, the problem didn’t start on Biden’s watch; President Trump blew out the deficit and passed large spending bills in 2020 after the pandemic hit, including the first set of stimulus checks. But while that’s undoubtedly playing a role in today’s inflation, it was also at the very peak of the COVID-19 emergency and is more understandable than what came next.
President Biden came into office with our understanding of the pandemic much more complete, vaccines already available, and a recovering economy. He nonetheless decided to ram through an utterly unnecessary $1.9 trillion spending bill, only 9 percent of which was directly related to mitigating COVID-19’s health effects. Biden pushed this spending even as economists from his own party, people like Larry Summers, warned this would cause an inflation surge.
It was an unforced error that drove the deficit up to $2.8 trillion, its second-highest level ever and second only to 2020, the very height of the emergency. Now, even liberal economists and pundits are acknowledging that the so-called American Rescue Plan was an “extraordinary policy mistake,” as one ex-Obama official recently put it in a New York Times Op-Ed.
On top of all of this, Biden has contributed to high prices with burdensome government policies in other areas. From the many Trump-era tariffs Biden could have repealed by now that raise the cost of goods for consumers to his anti-energy policies restricting fuel production and more, the President has made things worse, not better.
So while it’s true that inflation is a complex economic phenomenon not entirely within any one president’s control, Biden continues to deflect blame for inflation onto baseless scapegoats rather than take accountability for his own unforced policy errors.
It’s a disgraceful dereliction of duty—and the American people shouldn’t stand for it, not least because it means inflation won’t be mitigated.
Action Line: Your family needs a plan to fight inflation, and unlike Joe Biden, you can’t put that responsibility on anyone else. But you can get help. If you need a plan to invest with inflation in mind, I can help you. Get in touch and let’s get to work.
