JOE BIDEN’S ‘SHRINKFLATION’ BLAME GAME. By the time the Super Bowl started, it had been extensively reported that President Joe Biden had refused, for the second year in a row, to do the traditional Super Bowl interview. The conventional wisdom was that the 81-year-old president, who has granted relatively few interviews during his time in the White House and has been under intense scrutiny in the last few days for age-related cognitive problems, just could not risk a high-profile interview in his current condition. “It’s the biggest television audience — not even close — and you get a chance to do a 20, 25-minute interview on that day, and you don’t do it?” veteran Democratic strategist James Carville said. “That’s a kind of sign that the staff or yourself doesn’t have much confidence in you. There’s no other way to read this.”
Given that, most people who follow politics figured they wouldn’t see Biden on Super Bowl day. But Biden had other plans. If he would not, or could not, handle a Super Bowl interview, he would still get in on the Super Bowl story, creating an attention-getting, Super Bowl-themed video released a few hours before kickoff. No tough questions, no embarrassing pauses, just total White House control.
But what would it be about? Do not be embarrassed if you did not guess that Biden’s video would be about something he calls “shrinkflation.” Maybe you haven’t heard the word, but it refers to companies, in this case, snack food companies, including fewer chips, or cookies, or whatever, in packages that nevertheless still cost the same. It is, in other words, another form of inflation, which, of course, has hit the companies as much as it has hit consumers. The price doesn’t go up, but the product the buyer receives goes down.
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
“It’s Super Bowl Sunday,” Biden said in the video. “And if you’re anything like me, you like to be surrounded by a snack or two while watching the big game. You know, when buying snacks for the game, you might have noticed one thing. Sports drinks bottles are smaller. Bag of chips has fewer chips, but they’re still charging just as much. And as an ice cream lover, what makes me the most angry is that ice cream cartons have actually shrunk in size but not in price.”
Sitting in the White House theater next to a table stacked with easily identifiable food packages — Doritos, Oreos, Tostitos, Breyers Ice Cream, Gatorade, Wheat Thins — Biden continued: “I’ve had enough of what they call shrinkflation. It’s a rip-off. Some companies are trying to pull a fast one by shrinking the products little by little and hoping you won’t notice. Give me a break. The American public is tired of being played for suckers. I’m calling on companies to put a stop to this. Let’s make sure businesses do the right thing now.”
What???!!! What Biden calls shrinkflation is clearly real. Everybody who has been to a grocery store in the last couple of years knows that. But shrinkflation is just a form of inflation — the inflation that Biden and his colleagues in the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill fanned with trillions of dollars of reckless government spending. The shrinkflation that Biden denounces is at least partly the result of Biden’s policies.
What’s really going on here is that Biden, running behind former President Donald Trump in national and swing-state polls, is seeking to shift blame for his two biggest political liabilities as the 2024 campaign heats up. He is blaming Congress for the disaster at the U.S.-Mexico border, and he is blaming “companies … trying to pull a fast one” for inflation.
The problem, of course, is that the crisis at the border is all Biden’s responsibility, and inflation is in some significant part Biden’s responsibility. So, of course, he is pointing fingers in an effort to dodge election-year blame.
Some Democrats have been pushing the idea of shrinkflation for quite a while. In December, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) issued a report titled “Shrinkflation: How Corporations Are Shrinking Products to Super-Size Profits.” Casey called shrinkflation a form of “greedflation,” which he defined as “when corporations use inflation as cover to raise prices and increase their own profits.” Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) posted a warning about shrinkflation on X. “Giant corporations are shrinking how much they give but charging the same price or more,” she wrote. “We’re not fooled. Corporations are boosting their profits with these tricks. It’s time to crack down on shrinkflation and corporate greed.”
Biden himself got into the shrinkflation game during a Jan. 27 campaign appearance in Columbia, South Carolina. He told crowds that inflation is down and things are good, but it’s those bad corporations that are still making a trip to the grocery store an ordeal. “Inflation is coming down,” Biden said. “It’s now lower in America than any other major economy in the world. The cost of eggs, milk, chicken, gas, and so many other essential items have come down. But for all we’ve done to bring prices down, there are still too many corporations in America ripping people off — price gouging, junk fees, greedflation, shrinkflation. You see that article about the Snickers bars?” There, Biden was probably referring to a Jan. 18 New York Times piece headlined, “Why Are Voters So Upset? Consider the Snickers Bar,” which conceded that food prices are not only still high but are still rising, leading to customer unhappiness.
Biden blamed food companies and promised government action to lower candy bar prices. “Well, it’s going to stop,” he said in Columbia. “Americans, we’re tired of being played for suckers. And that’s why we’re going to keep these guys — keep on them and get prices down.”
Just for the record, Biden should be blaming himself more than the food companies. “One doesn’t need conspiracy theories to explain recent inflation,” Christian Britschgi wrote in Reason magazine recently. “The federal government’s $4 trillion in fiscal stimulus during the pandemic put a lot of cash in people’s hands right as production was falling. The inevitable result of more money chasing fewer goods is higher inflation. The Biden administration and a Democratic Congress made things even worse by passing a $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021, when an economic recovery was already underway.”
In the bigger picture, of course, Democrats, Biden included, have long blamed “corporate greed” for all sorts of ills, some of them of politicians’ own making. Now, with the presidential race underway, what the Biden campaign is trying to do is shift blame on an issue on which the president’s job approval rating is abysmally bad. A recent NBC poll found that the president’s job approval rating for handling the economy is just 36%, while 61% disapprove. And this is at a time when the administration and many of its allies in the media are frequently telling people that things are getting better and that the economy is, in fact, strong.
The problem is people are going by their own experience more than by what media figures tell them. Another recent poll, by CNN, found that just 26% of those surveyed believe the economy is “starting to recover from the problems it faced in the past few years.” That’s enough to alarm any president running for reelection while deeply underwater in the polls.
Joe Biden did not have what it takes to sit for an interview on Super Bowl Sunday. But faced with still-terrible polls and running behind his Republican rival, he summoned the energy for some old-fashioned blame-shifting. Now, the villain is “shrinkflation.” Next week and next month, if Biden’s polls stay in the cellar, it will be something else.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on Radio America and the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found.
