By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
When President Biden says something
isn’t inevitable, it is time to count on it as a dead-lock guarantee.
The president’s handling of events has
been poor and the same with his policies. But nothing has been quite as bad as
his snake-bit, maladroit, poorly informed, dishonest attempts to spin away the
miserable results of his governance, especially on the economy.
If he says the border is not a crisis,
there must be people crossing the Rio Grande en masse and getting admitted into
the United States and bussed to locales around the country in shocking numbers.
If he says the Afghanistan withdrawal was
an “extraordinary success,” it must have been a shambolic embarrassment that
left Americans behind, despite Biden’s assurance that that would never happen.
If he says the pandemic is effectively
over, as he did last July, it must mean a new wave of the virus is about to
send case counts soaring.
Even if none of these things had happened
and Biden never said a word about them, he would have torched his credibility
on the economy alone. He has produced a steady, ongoing farrago of false
assurances and blame-shifting that has amounted to a master class in not
convincing anyone of anything, except to tune out whatever he says.
According to Biden, things supposedly are
never as bad as they seem, and by the way, even if they are, they are
definitely not his fault.
The mantra from the president and his team
now is that a recession is not inevitable, which, on its own terms, is not the
most reassuring message. Something may not be inevitable and yet still be
possible or even much more likely than not.
The rule-of-thumb definition of a
recession is two quarters of negative GDP growth. In the first quarter, GDP
contracted 1.4 percent, and a forecast from the Atlanta Federal Reserve pegs
second-quarter growth at around 0, or on the knife’s edge of a second negative
quarter in a row.
In other words, what Biden insists is “the
fastest economy in the world” may be hardly growing at all.
If the U.S. does dip into a recession, we
can be sure that Biden will be among the last to acknowledge it, just as he and
his team pooh-poohed rising inflation as long as they could. It may be that
“not inevitable” ends up being the new “transitory” — a wishful claim that says
more about the people making it than real underlying conditions.
Biden is serving up large helpings of what
he famously called “malarkey” in his 2012 vice-presidential debate.
He likes to maintain now that he cut the
deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars when, in reality, the deficit had
already been forecast to come down after the surge of pandemic spending, and
his Covid-relief bill added substantially more deficit spending than there
would have been otherwise.
He has called the idea that his Covid bill
fueled inflation “bizarre” (while conceding that perhaps it had a “marginal,
minor” impact). Yet former Treasury secretary Larry Summers — name-checked by Biden
himself as an authority on the economy — famously predicted that the massive
bill could stoke inflation.
Walking on a Delaware beach while on
vacation this week, Biden upbraided a reporter for noting, truthfully, that
economists are saying that a recession is now more likely than ever. The
president joked that she sounded like a Republican, before lapsing into his
rote line that a downturn isn’t inevitable.
Biden has said that he believes that
Americans can “handle the truth.” Yes, they can, and the truth is that Biden’s
poor policy choices have worsened economic conditions, as shortages disrupt the
workings of the economy and inflation eats away at paychecks. Americans can
acknowledge all this — indeed, feel it every day — while not liking it or being
willing to tolerate it.
All indications are that Biden himself is
the one who can’t handle the truth.
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