The gaffe machine famous for heralding his boss Barack Obama for getting the Affordable Care Act over the finish line as a “big f***ing deal” was never expected to keep his presidency rated G in the language department, and after four years of Donald Trump’s tweets from the Oval Office, it’s hard to say that the White House deserves anything less than vulgarity. But at minimum, President Joe Biden, a president whose entire raison d’etre was to unify and “heal the soul” of a nation divided, ought to pretend to care about the most pressing problem plaguing the public.
When asked by Peter Doocy about the ramifications of inflation on the midterm elections, Biden was caught on a hot mic glibly mocking the question and calling the Fox News reporter a “stupid son of a b****.”
Catfights between onion-thin-skinned politicians and the press are older than the republic itself, but it’s not the subject of the slight that matters. It’s that Doocy was specifically asking about inflation, and of any elected official still in office, no one has been more stupid about the inflation problem than Biden.
Inflation is not happening for a single reason, and it cannot be blamed on a sole culprit. The post-Great Recession monetary policy progressivism has proven an utter failure, and although Trump wound up favoring a much less expansionist fiscal policy than he teased during the 2016 presidential campaign, he emphatically pressed the Federal Reserve to prolong its ultimately (and predictably) disastrous experiment with near-zero interest rates during the longest bull market in history. But ultimately, neither Biden nor Trump was responsible for the Fed maintaining low interest rates. They were responsible, however, for taking advantage of the Fed’s expansionary monetary policy through unprecedented spending. The difference is that Trump spent a cumulative $3.2 trillion throughout the height of the pandemic and before the vaccine rollout. By contrast, Biden juiced the economy with another $1.9 trillion that plenty of liberal economists, such as Larry Summers, warned would overheat an economy already overdue for inflation, all the while imposing regulations hampering everything from domestic oil production to the labor supply.
From handing Afghanistan back to the Taliban to record-shattering crossings of the southern border, Biden has plenty to be petrified of as he dooms Democrats to a shellacking in the midterm elections, but for voters, one matter dominates above all else. Nearly 3 in 10, or a plurality of voters polled by Gallup last month, listed the economy as their most pressing issue heading into the new year, with more than one-fifth of those voters citing inflation as their main concern. (That’s six times the number of those who named election reform, the recent focus of the Biden administration, as their primary political woe.)
Presidents can’t make much markedly better, but at minimum, we hope that they do not, despite ample warning, actively make problems. Inflation represents the worst ramification of Biden’s botched presidency, a totally preventable problem manufactured by a trifecta of bad monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policy, and one that hits the heart of the country the hardest.
