Joe Biden’s presidency should have begun as a success story. Biden inherited a good economic situation, benefited from Operation Warp Speed’s quick development of a vaccine, and got to see his predecessor make a disgrace of himself with his election-rigging conspiracy theories.
Yet instead of heading into the Roaring Twenties, liberating locked-up denizens to endless dinner parties and dances, we’re seemingly regressing into 1978. With Jerome Powell promising to keep interest rates around that historically safe level of near-zero, Biden is pumping trillions of dollars into the economy to bail out blue states already benefiting from Donald Trump’s own fast and loose hand, teachers unions happy to hold tens of millions of children hostage, and (former) workers who realize Uncle Sam and Wall Street have greater profit margins than Main Street.
The result? Inflation skyrocketed by 4.2% last month. It turns out that you can’t just scream, “But we’re the world’s reserve currency!” while devaluing said currency and forcibly inhibiting economic growth with ludicrous lockdowns. We fell 75% short of the expected million jobs created, rendering this last one the worst jobs report in history.
All of this raises the question: Where the hell is the man allegedly in charge here? And perhaps more importantly, where are the people apparently pulling the strings?
After Treasury Secretary (and Powell’s much more astute predecessor) Janet Yellen warned that interest rates would have to rise to prevent the economy from overheating, she quickly walked back her remarks under pressure from her boss, the way all of Biden’s more rational advisers are eventually forced to do.
The Left correctly liked to lampoon the Right’s defense of Trump as “but he fights!” Biden’s obvious impotence lends him to the critique that although we may have the nice tweets, he evidently does not fight at all. We shouldn’t be in a crisis at all, and yet, Biden only emerged on late Wednesday to address one of the crises heading his way.
Biden, formerly a supporter of Israel but always prone to idiotic foreign policy fads, had the proper cue cards in place, offering his “unwavering support” for Israel’s “right to defend itself.” But before Biden left, he gave the game away.
“I’m not supposed to be answering all these questions. I’m supposed to leave,” Biden said, returning to the podium perhaps to entertain the free press. But before he could defy his handlers, he remembered to follow directions, exiting just as a reporter asked about inflation. Oh well, at least inflation never cost a senile Democrat his entire career.
