They Really Do Think We’re Idiots

By Noah Rothman

Friday, February 23, 2024

 

President Joe Biden reportedly plans to spend a portion of his State of the Union Address leaning heavily into the notion that his fellow Americans are idiots.

 

“Biden embraced the concept of ‘shrinkflation’ in a Super Bowl message targeting major snack food corporations,” Politico reported on Friday. “As the president framed it, there are now ‘fewer chips’ in your bag, while companies are ‘still charging you just as much.’” The White House has been “aggressively testing” the message that American companies are not merely responding to price instability by providing consumers with less product for the same prices. Rather, that phenomenon is somehow the primary source of inflationary pressures, not an outgrowth of them.

 

Though nothing is settled yet, the president’s team is toying with taking this dubious claim to a joint session of Congress:

 

“It’s about framing this for the American people,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Biden’s open frustration with tactics like shrinkflation, the official added, “speaks to what they feel in a way that’s useful for us both in terms of messaging and making sure they understand that the president sees what’s going on.”

 

It requires an exceptional level of economic illiteracy to buy what the White House is selling here. Indeed, the only Americans who could fail to simply intuit the ways in which the president is misleading the public are likely insulated from the rising costs of daily life, which extend well beyond the number of ounces in a bottle of Gatorade.

 

The last Consumer Price Index survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that food costs across the board continued to rise last month, contributing to a 2.6 percent increase in the overall cost of food from one year ago (when, by the way, food costs were 10 percent higher than they were in January 2022). But it’s not just food that is pricier today than it used to be. Electricity is more expensive. Cars are more expensive. Medical costs are more expensive. Shelter and transportation services are more expensive. None of these increased expenditures fit within the rubric of “shrinkflation.”

 

Beyond the fact that the White House’s effort to shift blame on inflation is predicated on a low estimation of the public’s intelligence, it’s bizarre insofar as it is a counterproductive political-messaging campaign. Biden’s foremost task between today and Election Day is to incept in voters’ minds the notion that inflation is going down. Highlighting inflation’s undesirable effects on consumer products wouldn’t seem like the best way to go about that.

 

Even flirting with this strategy is more evidence that the Biden White House is possessed of entirely unearned faith in its own ability to shape our shared reality through its own cleverness. Why they would be laboring under that delusion still, at this late date, is anyone’s guess. It didn’t work for “Bidenomics,” an aborted messaging campaign aimed at convincing voters that the bad economy they hated was actually a good economy they loved. It didn’t work when the administration indicated it planned to pin the blame for the border crisis over which Joe Biden presided, and which Democrats insisted did not even exist until its existence became undeniable, on the GOP.

 

The president’s defenders could be inclined to forgive these failed attempts at cynical manipulation. After all, they might say, Biden has to play a bad hand. What’s he supposed to do? Well, the first thing he might do is avoid lying to the American people. That’s a good place to start.