“. . . [T]he idea we’re going to be able . . . to click a switch, bring down the cost of gasoline, is not likely in the near term, nor is it with regard to food,” President Joe Biden said. In other words, “Tough luck, America.”
Pres. Biden recently convened a White House pseudoevent to insist he has no control over gasoline and food prices, nor the other facets of Biden’s inflation-infested economy that's hammering every American.
Can you imagine Ronald Reagan or Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush or Harry Truman passing the buck that way? Even poor Jimmy Carter, who presided over the nadir of modern economic performance since the Great Depression until now, didn’t commit that callous faux pas.
Last month in Japan, Pres. Biden had the audacity to speak positively about skyrocketing prices at the pump back home: “[When] it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that . . . when it’s over, we’ll be . . . stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.”
Does that make you feel better forking over more than $4 for a gallon of gas? Or someday being forced to buy an electric vehicle that takes hours to charge enough to go as far as a tank of gas will take you, while the gas pump takes only a few minutes for a fill-up?
The Hippocratic Oath says “first, do no harm,” but Pres. Biden already has done our nation grave harm. He may not be solely responsible for the 40-year-high 8%-plus annual inflation rate, but Biden has most certainly thrown gasoline to intensify the inflation fire. An appreciable portion of the “tax” of inflation emptying Americans’ pocketbooks is attributable to the Biden administration’s deliberate economic and regulatory radicalism.
Biden has spurred gas prices' spiking. From his first day in office, when he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and slapped a freeze on oil and gas leases on federal property, he’s acted to stifle the life out of U.S. fossil fuel companies. He also unleashed regulators to hamper every industry with red tape and antitrust enforcers to swing their dangerous sledgehammers.
A methane tax plan, Securities & Exchange Commission climate regulatory burdens, siccing the radicalized Federal Trade Commission on oil and gas companies to trump up “price gouging” claims, manipulating regulatory estimates for an inflated "social cost of greenhouse gas emissions,” a massive federal land grab called 30 x 30.
These are some of the Biden tentacles intended to strangle established U.S. industries that extract, transport, process and distribute oil, natural gas, gasoline and diesel—abundant natural resources they put to practical usage throughout our nation and our economy, and that in the span of the Trump years made America energy-independent for the first time in decades.
While Biden chokes the neck of our oil and gas sector, the U.S. president begs the likes of the OPEC cartel and socialist Venezuela to boost crude oil pumping. Pres. Biden’s creating jobs—just not in the United States. He’d do better by aiming to create new U.S. oil refinery jobs.
Don’t forget Biden’s inflation installment payment, his early 2021 $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.” It slopped trillions more on top of multitrillion dollar spending bills (at least the earlier packages had the virtue of coming during the actual COVID-inflicted economic downturn and public health response). The Biden measure doled out money to middle class families and individuals, schools, and state and local governments—but less than 9% on COVID pandemic measures.
And there’s the Fed inflation factory, printing fiat money by the trillion. The Wall Street Journal called this “the fad of Modern Monetary Theory that low interest rates could finance any amount of government spending more or less forever.” It appears that theory ran into the wall of reality, judging by the epochal, rising inflation rate, now joined by rising interest rates. Stagflation may be around the corner.
Riffing on the Hippocratic Oath, then, Pres. Biden should “second, undo the harm you’ve caused.” Retracting all of the above would be a good first step.