Remember long gas lines under President Jimmy Carter? Gas is now over $3 per gallon. This is higher than it was under the Carter administration, $2.40, when accounting for inflation. Under Trump, it dropped under $2. We’re about to see deja vu of the Carter years with inflation, as Biden creates a legacy of attacking poor and low-income Americans right after entering office. He’s fostering this by handing out massive amounts of paper money in stimulus funds to special interest groups, and the pet pork is about to continue in his massive $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which is really a lot of so-called “human infrastructure,” not even transportation.
Why is this happening? If you print more paper money and hand it out to people, so many people have more money, the cost of things is going to increase. If enough people getting the handouts can afford $4 gallons of gas, suppliers are going to increase the cost in order to make more money. There hasn’t been any stimulus checks for everyone--e.g. the poor--since March, so they’re going to get hit the worst when consumer prices go up. Once inflation is rampant, the Fed will increase interest rates which is likely to lead to a recession.
Former President Donald Trump was aware of this when he signed stimulus bills, and kept much of the excess out of the bills. He was aware that there was a tipping point, where the free money had to stop flowing. Consequently, consumer prices stayed relatively low during the Trump administration. Inflation dropped during his presidency, to just 1.2% before he left office. Biden and the Democrats don’t care that COVID-19 is winding down, they are going to push the limit as far as they can to keep the money flowing to their pet issues and cronies, which keeps campaign contributions coming into Democratic coffers.
In the March COVID-19 stimulus bill, called the American Rescue Plan, Amtrak got $1.7 billion, no surprise since Biden has been funneling money to his home state big business for years. The National Endowment for the Arts received $135 million and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting $175 million. Another $5 billion went to farmers--as long as they’re not white. Obamacare got its first major expansion, almost $62 billion more. People with kids got more money; a single parent making $75,000 got an extra $1,400 per child.
The bill was full of money for the COVID-19 vaccine--but so many Americans oppose getting the vaccine that many doses are going unused, a waste. They can’t be transferred to other countries since they have expiration dates. Additionally, the Biden administration is currently wasting millions, if not billions, of money to lure people into getting the vaccine on reward programs that aren’t working; Biden’s goal is to get 70% of Americans vaccinated by July 4 but he’s clearly not going to reach it.
States are prohibited from using the aid to cut taxes, ensuring that many businesses don’t create jobs or invest. Instead, the money was prioritized for left wing states that stayed locked down the longest, punishing red states that got people back up and working faster.
Consumer prices are increasing everywhere, 5% over the past year, the biggest inflation spike since 2008. Energy costs are up 56.2% over the past year. Excluding energy and food, which are more volatile, prices are up 3.8% over the past year — the biggest 12-month jump since 1992. The price of lumber is at an all-time high, hurting the price of homes and trickling down to rent.
Democrats are attempting to downplay the inflation by saying it is temporary. But the Federal Reserve Chair under Carter, Arthur Burns, said the same thing. To bolster their defense, Democrats point to the increase in car prices being caused by the pandemic. But that is different, there is a direct correlation involved. There is a car shortage caused by a lack of semiconductors, because manufacturers pivoted to making semiconductors for home computers as people drove less and worked from home. And gas prices were increasing drastically even before the temporary spike caused by the Colonial Pipeline hacking.
Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, no conservative but obviously an expert on fiscal and monetary policy, is warning of a “Vietnam inflation scenario.” He says there is only a one in three chance that the current inflation won’t lead to a bad outcome.
When inflation was only moderately high under President George W. Bush in 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed him, saying inflation "threatens to devour the paychecks of hard-working Americans." So where is her concern for low-income Americans now? The poor will also be hit hard, food stamps will pay for less food.
The inflation shouldn’t be happening considering the economy is supposed to be rebounding with COVID-19 receding. We should be seeing a huge boom, such as after World War II when things returned to normal. The nation converted then from military production to peacetime production. The U.S. should be transitioning to post-COVID production, but instead Biden isn’t allowing it to by diverting money to pet causes. People trying to get back into the workforce are finding that the job situation doesn’t match their skills; there are plenty of jobs in the COVID-19 vaccine area and working for Amtrak but fewer where people really need them, since states aren’t allowed to give tax breaks to companies that could create those jobs. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, one of the few state AGs with guts to take on the Biden administration, sued the administration over the prohibition.
The Democrats’ plan is just to ignore inflation. "We’re going to keep an eye on it, but we think it should resolve in the next few months," Sameera Fazili, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, said. It’s painful, but the Democrats are ensuring that Republicans dominate the midterm elections and defeat Biden in 2024.
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