I recently came across an article in Bloomberg News that made me laugh out loud. It's called "America Needs Higher, Longer Lasting Inflation" It's written by some guy named Karl W. Smith, and it's actually being reprinted in a bunch of places. It's part of an elaborate media effort now trying to cover up or justify the failures of the Biden administration.
You might remember — just a few days ago on social media — The Washington Post had an article telling Americans, 'let's not complain about the breakdown of the supply chains, let's not complain about the fact that this or that product is no longer available due to a week-long wait or month-long wait.' Their point is, 'let's just lower our expectations.'
This is really life as lived in a country moving in a socialist direction: You just have to get used to less. You've got to get used to bad news. The good news is when the bad news isn't so bad. These articles are a perfect example of this.
The writer goes on to make a kind of crazy-kook argument where he, in a sense, says, 'Listen, the great advantage of inflation is that right now when interest rates are really low, if the federal reserve needs to lower them further, there's not much place to go. You can just go down to zero. You can't go below that.'
So, if inflation is higher, it gives the Fed a little bit more room to operate. Imagine a seemingly serious person arguing for inflation on the grounds that it gives the Fed more tools to tinker with the money supply. The Fed, by the way, is the primary cause of inflation in the first place. Why? By printing money, by and large, to bankroll the projects of the Biden administration.
They're essentially imposing a silent tax on the American people. If something that costs $100 now costs $110, well, that basically means that you're going to have to pay more for it. Another way to look at it is your paycheck just took a cut, even without the government actually taking a literal bite out of that paycheck.
We're facing not just the prospect of inflation — which is bad enough — but inflation combined with slow growth. Slow growth plus inflation is called stagflation. Stagnant plus inflation gives you stagflation.
Stagflation was last given to us by another Democrat, Jimmy Carter. It ground the economy to a halt. This was really the main domestic problem that Reagan inherited. On the foreign policy front, the Soviet Union, yes, but on the domestic front, stagflation was a very painful problem to deal with. In fact, it took a deep recession to get America out of this pit that the Democrats had dug us into. And they're doing it again.
Inflation has been something we've successfully tackled for almost 30 years, but now it's almost as if we're back to the 1970s. We've seen the biggest 12-month rise in prices due to inflation, really, since August 2008 before the financial crisis basically sent the economy into a tailspin.
The Federal Reserve has been predicting two percent inflation, which is less than half of the over five percent inflation rate we're looking at. The Fed has said, 'We're kind of hoping this is going to be sort of temporary,' but it's very clear, month after month as the numbers come in, that this is not really temporary. This is something we're going to have to live with. And that was the point of the article that was trying to get us used to living with inflation as a normal part of our lives. In other words, this kind of government theft of peoples' spending power is now supposed to be normal. Just get used to it. Stop complaining about it.
Gas prices are up 42 percent over a year ago. Think about that. This burden falls more heavily on Republicans because they tend not to live concentrated in cities but in more rural areas. They travel longer distances. So who do you think pays the price when gas prices soar like this?
Used car prices are up almost 25 percent from a year ago. Food prices jumped 1.2 percent in September alone, so that extrapolated out is a substantial inflation rate. All these failures can be pointed not to COVID, not to some inevitable globalization breakdown, but to the policy failures of the Biden administration.
It's kind of disgusting to see that Pete Buttigieg, who's supposed to be managing this supply chain crisis, has taken a two-month paternity leave. So this guy doesn't show up for meetings, he doesn't take calls, he's really not working while the media's acting like, 'Well, wait a minute, shouldn't he also be entitled to paternity leave?'
There's an infrastructure plan, Pete's also the point man with the supply chains, and he's nowhere to be found. He's posting pictures of himself doodling on a swing with his partner, so this is an embarrassing situation that is having a real-world effect on ordinary people — pinching them, making their lives more difficult.
If you're looking for someone to blame, well, they're all sitting right there in Washington, D.C.