What Did They Expect?

With gasoline pushing $5 a gallon, and forecast to top $6 by August, our 'What, me worry?' President is worrying. Or, more aptly, whining. Whining that his popularity is lower than Trump's was, that the press isn't doing a good enough job at selling his Presidency to the public, that his staff isn't telling him things (see: baby formula crisis) while instructing him on what not to do (e.g. answer reporters' unscripted questions), and that he's being dogpiled by problems.

Meanwhile, the office where, 77 years earlier, its occupant placed a sign reading "The Buck Stops Here," bears witness to Joliet Jake Biden blathering every excuse imaginable for why nothing's his fault. Why, despite an overt war on carbon energy, a couple dozen policy moves hindering oil and gas exploration and harvesting, the cancellation of pipeline projects, and a very clear message to industry that long-term investment in anything oil, gas, or coal related will be kiboshed by the sledgehammer of government, it's the oil companies' (and Putin's) fault that gas prices are sky high and not done climbing.

Oh, and inflation. Any Econ 101 student with a shred of intellectual honesty could have predicted that the massing printing-press response to COVID, and the subsequent "let's spend absurd amounts of money on our progressive honey-do list" would devalue the dollar. Making things worse, the administration failed to act in any logically remediating way in response to the supply chain problems and shipping port bottlenecks.

Anyone who warned of such eventualities was either ignored or derided by the blue water-carriers in the mainstream press, and the Best-and-Brightest trotted out inanities like Modern Monetary Theory to tell us that our inflation worries were born of right-wing lies and disinformation.

Thing is, natural phenomena don't care about narratives, or whether they'll make someone look bad.

So, here we are, with an economy teetering on stagflation, and those Best-and-Brightest feeling cold sweat running down their spines as they fumfer their lame excuses and deflections.

While refusing to change course. While refusing to undo any of the policies that contributed to these problems, and insisting that spending monstrosities such as Build Back Better will alleviate, rather than exacerbate, inflation.

Can they really be that stupid?

Alas, it seems so.

Unless they're relying on the continued stupidity or gullibility of the voters to keep them in power. And, with hot-button issues such as abortion and gun control serving as useful deflectors, they're continuing to pitch to their base the evils and existential threat of the other team.

On top of that, we have the biggest idiots of all, the supporters of Democratic Socialists (the politicians and candidates themselves are canny hucksters, playing to some voters' lazy selfishness), continuing their efforts to install destroyers in public office.

As P.T. Barnum noted, "there's a sucker born every minute."

But, I expect that people burned by broken promises (we'll green the economy and your life will be better for it!) are not as likely as the Terrible Tetrad hope to leave Congress in Democrats' hands.

The nation, and that includes the Democrats, owes a giant thank-you to Joe Manchin, whose 'intransigence' in the face of Biden's crazy spending fantasies has saved us from even worse inflation. Inflation, mind you, is permanent. The few blips of deflation across history are drops in a bucket, and once you've lost wealth and purchasing power to inflation, it's gone forever. Once it flattens out, productivity growth may restore some of what was lost, but that lost ground never gets made up, and we'll all be lagging where we might have been forever after.

Back to Biden et al. What did they expect to happen with all these policies? Did they really so surround themselves with toadies, lickspittles, and echoers that the inevitable consequences of their policies were either waved off or went totally undiscussed? Did they figure they had enough blind loyalists who'd not be bothered by inflation and expensive everything to be able to weather the ire of the unwashed masses? Or did they simply shove their finger in their ears and their heads in the sand?

I'm inclined to think that they didn't expect inflation this bad or this quick, and they didn't figure their anti-oil policies would spike gas prices so rapidly. 'Pass all the laws we can, get past the mid-terms, and people will grow accustomed to the new normal' was, I've long surmised, the game plan.

Reality intruded, and our Best-and-Brightest are faced with quite the conundrum: Change course and admit all their policies were wrong, or be bull-headed and let the people they supposedly serve suffer even more.

Forty-three years ago, the last time we experienced stagflation, Jimmy Carter delivered his infamous “malaise” speech. His “spend more” policies made things worse, and he lost his job. We are, unfortunately, stuck with Biden for a couple more years. But, if he loses Congress, and the GOP grows enough of a spine to eschew its past profligacy, perhaps the spending might be reined in a bit, and this bout of stagflation might not be as bad.

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Peter.