By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Mere hours after learning that the inflation rate
remained at its highest level since the late 1970s, President Biden put the finishing
touches on his plans for a victory rally. The honoree of the rally: his party’s
magnificently misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which, he said, was poised to
reduce costs “at the kitchen table.” Chutzpah, thy name is Joseph.
“If you think it,” say the mystics, “it will happen.”
Evidently, President Biden cannot be bothered to wait for the happening part.
Prices are still on the rise; the markets are still tanking; interest rates are still up — but the show
must go on. Once upon a time, “We did it, Joe!” was a sardonic meme. Today, it
is sour reality. The price of fuel oil is up 70 percent. The price of
electricity is up 16 percent. The price of eggs is up 40 percent. The price of
meat is up 9 percent. The price of rent is up more than in any month since
January of 1991. Hurrah?
The scale of Biden’s effrontery is tough to comprehend.
It is as if, after receiving the latest dispatch from the Light Brigade, Lord
Palmerston had organized a celebration of military charges, or, on the day the
country learned of the infamous 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, President
Nixon had seen fit to stage a televised clambake in honor of Data Integrity. To
adapt an overused phrase, one must suspect in this case that the brazenness is
the point. This afternoon’s speech was a showing-off, a provocation, a
finger-in-the-eye. The president is irked and bored by the persistence of
inflation in the economy, and, with the midterms looming, he wants it off his
plate. And so, with an unbecoming impatience, he decided to smash the plate.
The trouble is, reality doesn’t work like that. If it
wishes to, the White House can insist that all is hunky-dory. If they so
choose, the Democrats can slap the words “inflation reduction” on a bunch of
their long-held partisan priorities and hope that no one cottons on. If they
see fit, the media can acquiesce to the ruse. But none of that will stop the
rest of us from noticing that the emperor is naked down to the studs.
And worry not, people have noticed: During
last night’s football game, Domino’s Pizza ran an advertisement that began,
“Now that gas prices are so high” and ended with a reference
to the “high prices” in the economy writ large. Looks as if someone didn’t get
the memo.
Or, rather, it looks as if they got it, and then
assiduously ignored it. As a rule, you can count me among the many Americans
who worry about the pernicious effect that media bias has upon our politics. In
this case? Not so much. Consumers know how much gas costs; it’s listed on the
signs. They can see the price of milk; it’s printed on the label. They can read
the writing on the wall; they, not Karine Jean-Pierre or James Taylor or the hosts at MSNBC, are obliged to
sign the checks. Rally or no rally, interposition or no interposition,
propaganda or no propaganda, the public knows that inflation is an ongoing
catastrophe, it knows that this is in part the product of the Democratic Party’s
unwarranted profligacy, and it knows that the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is
a dud. No amount of cheerleading will change that.
Responding to this morning’s numbers, President Biden
said that it would “take more time and resolve to bring inflation down.” Time?
Sure — that’s a truism. But resolve? Whose resolve, one
must ask. Certainly not President Biden’s. Resolve requires focus and
self-control, and President Biden exhibits neither of those qualities. The
specter of inflation was floating on the horizon on the day that Biden was
inaugurated, and, since then, his responses have been (a) to sign a $2 trillion
party-line spending extravaganza that, per Morgan Stanley, “turbocharged
consumption and drove inflation to 40-year highs”; (b) to insist, after having
done this, that an increase in inflation was not going to happen; (c) to
eventually admit that inflation was happening after all, and then to do
absolutely nothing to address it; (d) to pretend that another huge deficit-increasing
bill that had nothing to do with inflation would act as a salve; and (e) to
wait just one week after signing that bill before illegally
ordering up to $1 trillion in inflationary debt “forgiveness.” If, indeed, it
will take “resolve” to end our inflationary cycle, that resolve will have to
come from elsewhere.
One suspects that President Biden believes that he will
wake up one day and inflation will have disappeared in a puff of malarkey. But
this, alas, is not how inflation works. There is a reason that the politicians
and economists who lived through the last inflationary crisis speak about it
with ashen faces in hushed tones, and that reason is that inflation is nearly
unique among economic problems in that the measures necessary to end it can be
almost as destructive and unpopular as it is. The United States has just gone
through two quarters of negative growth — which, typically, is a sign of
recession. The Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates by 2.5 percentage
points this year already, and it is likely to raise them another 0.75 points
next week. Last year, the average mortgage rate in the United States was 2.88
percent; today it is almost 6 percent. At some point, these developments will
begin to eat away at inflation — and, to borrow a phrase from the 1970s, they
might even work together to “whip it.”
But that won’t be cause for a celebration rally, either.
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