When Will Magical Economic Thinking from Biden and Co. End?
Biden is tone-deaf to the harm of his reckless spending policies.
by Veronique de Rugy
June 1, 2022, 10:16 PM
President Joe Biden wants you to know he is serious about taming inflation and that he has a plan to do so. Unfortunately, his plan reveals that his administration is either in deep denial or doesn’t understand the real cause of inflation. His proposal, therefore, is all but guaranteed to fail.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the president outlined three policy choices to deal with an inflation caused, he seems to believe, largely by pandemic-related supply-chain obstructions and intensified by the war in Ukraine. His plan is simple: continue to trust that one of the main architects of our current inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, will raise interest rates fast and high enough to tame inflation without crashing the economy, dispense more subsidies and tax credits, and let the deficit melt away — by some miracle — without cutting spending.
Absent from the piece is any acknowledgment of what readers of this column know all too well: that inflation was fueled by Biden’s own reckless spending policies, especially the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021. Half a dozen or so studies have shown that fiscal policies implemented during COVID-19 are a main culprit behind today’s inflation. Biden also fails to mention the Fed’s overly accommodating monetary policy and its current slow response to inflation.
In other words, the president’s argument is amazing for its tone-deafness, inconsistent thinking, and sheer economic ignorance.
For instance, Biden brags about how much more financially comfortable Americans are right now because of his policies. But he fails to note that inflation is reducing the purchasing power of the dollar and diminishing the value of Americans’ savings. In the same way, he takes pride that “millions of Americans (are) getting jobs with better pay.” What he fails to note is that inflation is actually reducing these workers’ real wages.
more
https://spectator.org/when-will-magical-economic-thinking-from-biden-and-co-end/