Inflation Is the Five-Alarm Fire Burning Down the American Economy

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

 

Yesterday, I warned people to brace for another month of bad inflation numbers. This morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the new inflation numbers for the month of June, and somehow, they’re even worse than the grim forecast:

 

Shoppers paid sharply higher prices for a variety of goods in June as inflation kept its hold on a slowing U.S. economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday.

 

The consumer price index, a broad measure of everyday goods and services, soared 9.1% from a year ago, above the 8.8% Dow Jones estimate. That marked another month of the fastest pace for inflation going back to December 1981.

 

Here are the U.S. inflation numbers, by month, since October: 6.2 percent, 6.8 percent, 7 percent, 7.4 percent, 7.8 percent, 8.5 percent, 8.2 percent, 8.6 percent, and now 9.1 percent.

 

That’s an absolutely brutal stretch, and the American people would be infuriated by it under any circumstances. But I suspect there’s particular anger among anyone who remembers Biden’s declaring about a year ago, “Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen are — were expected and expected to be temporary. . . . There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist.”

 

Back in December, Biden said he thought inflation had peaked.

 

This should end the silly talk that the upcoming midterm elections will revolve around abortion, gun control, or the January 6 committee’s findings. Runaway inflation is the five-alarm fire that is burning down the American economy. The Biden administration keeps telling Americans that things are about to get better — that skyrocketing prices for gasoline, food, and just about everything they buy will start to ease. And month after month, Americans keep waiting.

 

Don’t forget, there is a good chance that, on the morning of July 29, the headline will be, “U.S. Now in Recession.”

 

Our Insecure President

 

One of the many problems of the Biden administration — and in fact one of its most severe, self-inflicted wounds — is the president’s reflexive defensiveness and denial when presented with bad news, new challenges, or evidence of failure.

 

Biden couldn’t just accept that some citizens of Central American countries interpreted his campaign rhetoric as an invitation to immigrate. He insisted that the surge in illegal immigrants at the border was just part of a routine seasonal pattern: “It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.”

 

Except it wasn’t, and that surge of migrants is still ongoing. And quite a few of them are being kept here in the U.S. instead of deported. Jeffrey Anderson, writing in City Journal earlier this week, noted that:

 

DHS statistics show that from Biden’s Inauguration Day through May 2022 — just 16 months and change — about 1.05 million migrants were apprehended on the southwestern border and then released into the U.S. That’s more than were apprehended on that border and released into the U.S. during the four years from Fiscal Year 2017 through Fiscal Year 2020. Under Biden, authorities have detained and released into the U.S. about 2,200 migrants a day on average — four times as many as the approximately 550 per day apprehended and released during the eight fiscal years preceding Biden. And these tallies don’t include unaccompanied minors, let alone the unknown sums of people who have evaded capture.

 

If all 1.05 million of those migrants had settled in one place, forming a wholly new city in the process, that new settlement would now be the tenth-largest city in the U.S. Forty-four of the 50 states don’t have a single city that large.

 

As mentioned on The Editors yesterday, it’s not just that Joe Biden stands by his indisputably troubled and scandal-ridden son, Hunter. It’s that he insists that Hunter is “the smartest man I know” and that he’s confident Hunter has done nothing wrong.

 

Touting the capabilities of the Afghan army, dismissing reports of the Taliban’s strength, insisting Iran can be a reasonable negotiating partner . . . Biden keeps assuring us that everything will turn out fine. When things don’t turn out fine and disaster ensues, Biden insists he would have had to have been “a mind reader” to see the problem coming.

 

Joe Biden has been around American politics for a long, long time, and even the portraits that are relatively flattering, such as Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, portray Biden as having deep-rooted insecurity, a constant need to prove how smart he is, and a prickly defensiveness at even the fairest criticism. Biden has a hard time changing course because that means admitting that his first decision was wrong.

 

Back in 1987, when taking questions at a campaign event in New Hampshire, Biden unleashed what the Washington Post called “his worst moment,” and it is rather spectacular for its raw portrait of a man bristling at the slightest possibility of criticism, and consumed with the fear that other people don’t think of him as smart:

 

“I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”

 

Some may hear echoes of Fredo’s outburst from Godfather II — “I’m smart, and I want respect!”

 

It will probably not shock you to learn that Biden wildly exaggerated his credentials, as the Post noted:

 

·        Biden did not go to Syracuse Law School on a “full academic scholarship.” It was a half scholarship based on financial need.

 

·        He didn’t finish in the “top half” of his class. He was 76th out of 85.

 

·        He did not win the award given to the outstanding political-science student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware.

 

·        He didn’t graduate from Delaware with “three degrees,” but with a single B.A. in political science and history.

 

Three decades later, again as a presidential candidate in New Hampshire, Biden had another weirdly hostile, defensive exchange with a voter. The woman asked Biden why his supporters should trust that he could turn his campaign around after a fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Biden asked her if she’s ever been to a caucus before; when she said yes, Biden snapped, “No, you haven’t. You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”

 

In Biden’s mind, the problem couldn’t possibly be that he had turned in a disappointing performance in Iowa; it had to be that the young woman just didn’t understand the caucus system. When she surprised him and said she had been to a caucus before, Biden’s mind rejected the possibility. (It is rather ironic that the allegedly feminism-friendly Democratic Party ended up nominating the Lord of the Mansplainers.)