When President Joe Biden decided to light the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar on fire with his $2 trillion “American Rescue Plan,” economists whose warnings Biden refused to heed ranged from Greg Mankiw and Michael Strain on the Right to Olivier Blanchard and Larry Summers on the Left. But one economist Biden is now listening to? Cookie Monster.
“He pointed out his cookies are getting smaller, paying the same price,” the 81-year-old president said of the 58-year-old Muppet, who recently posted about the woes of shrinkflation. “I was stunned when I found out that’s what actually happened.”
Of course, shrinkflation surprises Biden for the same reason that the inflation crisis he created wound up stunning the entire White House, as “shrinkflation” is just Bidenflation by another name. The cause is exactly the same: too many dollars — printed by Biden’s Treasury — chasing too few goods and services, whose supplies were slowed thanks to a combination of environmental, labor, and pandemic-era regulation as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was directly triggered by Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Whining about the shrinkflation he created only allows Biden to pretend that the source of the phenomenon is different than his piss-poor fiscal policy more broadly. But to illustrate what shrinkflation is really measuring, let us use Cookie Monster’s preferred poison.
Whereas the consumer price index for food as a general category has increased by 31% since Biden took office, chocolate chip cookie prices in particular have increased by a staggering 37% since January 2021. Cookie manufacturers can either keep package sizes the same and stun customers by increasing prices by a third — a severe psychological shock that would make them think twice — or they can reduce the size of the package and number of cookies by 27% (the reduction factor is a mathematical formulation distinct from the inflation factor). This way, the price per ounce or price per cookie is the same, but all but the most discerning of shoppers will realize they are getting ripped off.
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There are plenty of other ways to illustrate the way Bidenomics has made us all worse off. Average weekly paychecks have lost 5% of their real values, tantamount to Uncle Sam (or Grandpa Joe) stealing one paycheck per 26 biweekly paychecks per year to fund his inane green agenda. Furthermore, because gas is always sold by the gallon, Americans cannot ignore the pain of energy prices being up 32% since Biden took office. But sometimes, paying less for fewer cookies is all the evidence we need to know that “shrinkflation” and Bidenflation is a distinction without a difference.
And if after all that math, you still don’t get the point, our friends at Unleash Prosperity Now have provided the visual.
