The House of Representatives is going to become Republican in the next election. If Mr. Trump doesn’t meddle, the Senate might too.
Midterms punish the party that holds the White House. Then there’s President Biden’s low popularity caused, in large measure, by the Biden administration’s bungling inflation.
Team Biden is squandering its remaining political capital by peddling an unbelievable story that rising prices are due to greedy corporations, Vladimir Putin, and COVID. That’s political suicide.
Facepalm! Merchants are always out to raise prices at any opportunity, as observed by no less than Adam Smith (the progenitor of capitalism and foe of mercantilism) in Wealth of Nations, Book I chapter X. Competition fostered by free enterprise prevents merchants from price gouging. Not officious government meddling.
Consumer prices were on a sustained sharp rise well before Putin even threatened to invade Ukraine. That invasion may exacerbate some price increases. It did not cause them.
COVID-driven supply-chain disruptions may lead to the spiking of some prices but does not explain inflation. If Jerome Powell hadn’t made the money printer go brrr we wouldn’t have inflation. Period.
Biden’s effort to blame Big Business, Putin and COVID is not merely wrong. In the immortal words of Wolfgang Pauli, it’s “not even wrong.”
Per Cambridge Forecast Group Blog: “An argument that appears to be scientific is said to be not even wrong if it cannot be falsified (i.e., tested) by experiment or cannot be used to make predictions about the natural world.”
The Donks’ implausible blame-shifting is doubly weird because Donald Trump’s bashing of the Fed into sinking the dollar clearly is, after the standard time lag, the culprit behind our current inflation.
Without exonerating Biden for reappointing Powell, to be confirmed by a feckless Senate this week, as I (a conservative!) pointed out at The Freedomist:
“Donald Trump spent a lot of time pounding the table for a weaker dollar going on two years ago:
“Trump, a very 'in the moment' guy, surely had no idea that a weak dollar would cause inflation later. But … you get the drift.
“Fed chairman Jay Powell discretely accommodated Trump’s incessant demands. Now Trump’s inflation chickens are coming home to roost … in the Biden henhouse.”
The Congressional Republicans’ weaponized counternarrative blames inflation on lavish spending. Profligate government spending (at which the GOP connived!) is, yes, a bad thing.
It is not the cause of inflation which is, in the words of Milton Friedman, “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” (Original emphasis.)
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has been taken hostage by progressive fanatics like Elizabeth Warren. They are trying to push the Democrats hard left, hard.
These zealots ignore how the voters of the Democratic Party nominated Joe Biden, the least left of the presidential aspirants. These extremists ignore how the leftward tilt of the Democratic Party led to what the left then termed an “unmitigated catastrophe” in 2020.
Calling on the Donks to lean lefter faster is political suicide. Pragmatic Democratic strategists, as reported by the center-left New York Times, now “use words like ‘horrible’ and ‘debacle’ to describe a political environment that has gone from bad to worse over the last three months. Many fault the White House for steering President Biden too far to the left as he sought to pass social spending legislation stuffed with progressive priorities.”
Senior Republican partisans like Karl Rove wryly cry “Please, Democrats, Follow Warren’s Plan” (to push the Democratic Party even further left) so that “the anticipated Republican midterm victory will turn into a Republican tsunami.”
I would take pleasure in seeing the Donks liquidate their party … if the Republicans were offering policies for prosperity (rather than social Darwinism mislabeled as supply-side economics). But without a functioning Democratic Party I worry that the Republicans will regress to the mean of serving their Thurston Howell III and Lovey country club owners.
It’s the inflation, stupid! Drawing on the work of Steve Hanke, I warned President Biden about the onrushing inflation almost a year ago. I renew my counsel to stop the money printer going brrr!
Presidential Counselor Cedric Richmond! Rescue Mr. Biden by placing on his oval office desk a sign, facing the president, reminding him to stop inflation, without inducing recession, immediately. Tell Mr. Biden to stop the buck there.
The buck stops here.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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