“I’m doing everything within my power by executive orders to bring down prices and address the Putin price hikes,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday in Iowa, just hours after the Labor Department announced that over the past 12 months, inflation has risen 8.5%, the highest rate in more than 40 years.
Biden was in Iowa to promote the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to issue an emergency waiver to allow E15 gasoline (gas that uses a 15% ethanol blend) to be sold throughout the summer months when it is normally banned because it hurts air quality.
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The White House claims that allowing E15 to be sold in the summer will reduce gas prices for consumers, but only 2% of gas stations in the nation sell E15 gas, and considering the world is about to face a global food shortage thanks to the war in Ukraine, maybe now is not the best time to be turning food into fuel. Grocery prices have spiked 10% over the past year, and turning corn into gas is only going to make that problem worse.
What would truly cut energy prices is a firm commitment from Biden to do everything in his power to increase domestic fossil fuel production. Unfortunately, Biden has been doing the exact opposite. During his first week in office, Biden ended all new oil and gas leases on public lands, made production on private lands more expensive through regulation, and made it more expensive to transport energy by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline. His Securities and Exchange Commission appointees recently made fossil fuel production even more expensive by forcing all publicly traded companies to report their “climate-related risks” to the government every year.
Another thing Biden could do to help tame inflation is to announce publicly that he is completely abandoning his signature domestic policy program, Build Back Better, and will instead seek a federal government spending freeze. More than anything else, this would send a strong signal that the fountain of federal spending driving this inflation is being turned off.
It just so happens that economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published a paper last month showing that while inflation is up in many developed countries (including 3.6% in France and 5.1% in Germany), the main reason inflation is much higher in the United States is due to all the stimulus spending the federal government threw at consumers.
More than $800 billion has been directly sent to households by the federal government since the pandemic began, the largest chunk coming when Biden and the Democrats sent everyone a $1,400 check as soon as they came into power.
“Since the first half of 2021, U.S. inflation has increasingly outpaced inflation in other developed countries,” the authors write. “U.S. income transfers may have contributed to an increase of about 3 percentage points by the fourth quarter of 2021.”
Biden is desperate to avoid blame for the economy’s inflation crisis, hence his effort to shift blame to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his barbaric invasion of Ukraine.
As terrible as the war is, however, inflation had already risen from just 1.7% when Biden took office to 7.9% the day Putin invaded. This means that even if Putin is responsible for all inflation since the war began, Biden is still responsible for more than 90% of the rest of the price hikes from which consumers are suffering.
With wages up just 5.6% in the past year, this means workers have taken a 2.7% wage cut under Biden. No wonder more than 60% of voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy.
