Inflation climbed at the fastest pace in 40 years across the economy, driven in large part by higher energy prices themselves driven in large part by Joe Biden’s energy policy toward Russia and inability to use obsequiousness get OPEC to pump more oil (while leasing less federal land for oil and gas drilling than any president since the end of World War II.) The last time inflation reached over nine percent was 1981 when Ronald Reagan took over from Jimmy Carter. Fueling the inflationary jump was the energy index, which rose 7.5 percent compared to a year ago and contributed nearly half of the overall increase in inflation. That index includes prices for fuel, oil, gasoline and electricity, and it’s up 41.6 percent for the year, the largest 12-month increase since April 1980 under President Jimmy Carter. The consumer price index was 9.1 percent higher earlier this summer than last. There are fears sources of strength in the economy — like the labor market and consumer spending — won’t be enough to fend off another recession. Yet the Fed may need to work more forcefully to slow the economy by raising interest rates, which the central bank has done multiple times this year already. Biden called on Americans to sacrifice, especially at the gas pump, to help win the war against Putin in Ukraine.
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For Next Time, Memo to Trump
If there is a next debate (you say no, but it depends on whether you’re ahead or behind in a month, and a fair choice of moderators being offered) it won’t be for a few weeks or so, leaving you, Trump, plenty of time to tidy up some of the missed opportunities from the first debate. Try some of these ideas. They’ll work on the trail, too.
For any of Kamala’s new programs under her “opportunity economy,” such as tax cuts for small businesses and a measly $25k for first-time home buyers (the average house costs $412k, so Kamala’s offer is only about half of the down payment. But try things in California where the average housing cost is $793k) punch back with “You’ve had three years, why haven’t you just done it?” and follow-up with “And how are you going to pay for that, with tax increases on the middle class?”
One of your most effective points in the first debate was in your closing statement, when you asked Kamala rhetorically why she did not initiate any of her special programs as Vice President. The question should next time be aimed directly at her, as it puts her in a real bind; either she can admit as VP she did very little and had power enough to do even less, or throw Joe under the bus and claim he stymied her initiatives. It is win-win for you. In addition, the question drives home the larger point of tying Kamala to the Biden administration. Harris needs badly to show something to the public to give them a reason to think she would be different than the last four years. She is desperate not to run as the pseudo-incumbent, all that “turn the page” and call for change stuff she borrows from Obama 2008, and you should be equally desperate to hold her to what has and has not taken place these last four years. Reminded the public the Biden-Harris administration created all the major issues Harris raised as problems (economy, immigration) during the debate.
On the economy, remind people food prices rose 5.3 percent under your administration while in Biden’s first three years food prices increased, conservatively, by 20.3 percent.
Almost 50 percent of Americans think the U.S. economy is in a worse state now than it was when Biden-Harris took office in January 2021. It’s true; the Census Bureau released an update earlier this month on income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States. Income-wise many Americans were still not quite better off than they were in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, nor necessarily even than they were in 2020. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Harris trailed you by 13 points on the economy, the issue that matters most to voters. It’s one of the main reasons why she’s tied and not ahead of you in the race overall.
Create a simple app that calculates what groceries would have cost four years ago. People plug in their current register tape numbers and are told what a similar basket of goods would have cost under your administration. It actually looks like someone had once done most of the heavy lifting on this one already. One of your official Super PACs launched a website (now defunct) named “Biden-Mart” that let users compare Trump-era grocery prices to current costs under Joe Biden’s administration. Biden-Mart.com, published by the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC, featured an interactive grocery checklist encouraging users to “check off the items… to compile your weekly grocery list and see how much more expensive your bill has become under Joe Biden.” There were over two dozen common food staples to choose from, including coffee, dairy products, and a variety of different fruits and vegetables. For example, a two-pound bag of apples, two pounds of ground beef, seven lemons, one gallon of milk, and one pound of sugar and coffee each totaled $30.07 — a killer 57.11 percent increase from the $19.14 it cost during your administration. Egg prices remain 72 percent higher today than when Biden entered office in early 2021. Biden-Mart used data mostly from the United States Department of Agriculture so it should be relatively quick to reconstruct the app.
And build a separate app that calculates gas and mortgage costs. It will remind people during your first three years in office, food prices rose by 5.3 percent as wages soared past them at 12.7 percent growth. Wages have not kept up with food prices during Biden-Harris. It is one thing to talk about inflation as this percentage or that, quite another to reach into a voter’s pantry and hit them with a specific dollar amount. As the Harris-favoring New York Times wrote “Optimistic words and some admirable proposals aren’t enough to overcome the discontent and anger that a large majority of Americans feel about the economy.” Harris word-checks “freedom” with abandon, but never mentions freedom from debt, from living paycheck-to-paycheck because of inflationary practices under Biden-Harris. Harris, as vice president, cast the tie-breaking vote economists point to as the cause of inflation — the ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” Remind the people they deserve better.
The Biden-Harris administration admitted some 21 million aliens, dramatically more than under the Vietnam War evacuation and the Mariel Boatlift combined. Will you Kamala admit another 21 million under a Harris administration? Talk about what that number means; in 2021, there were around only 3.66 million live births in the United States.
Focus on narrative, personal stories about ordinary Americans unfairly burdened by unchecked migration. Never mind the dogs and cats, Springfield, Ohio, a semi-rural town of only some 60,000 people, ended up playing host to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. They overwhelmed the city’s medical and social services systems to the point where the governor had to send in state troopers and millions of dollars as a palliative. Still the poverty rate for the city is 22.7 percent, well-above the state average of 13.4 percent. Fatal car accidents in Springfield increased four-fold last year, due to a surge of Haitian migrants unfamiliar with U.S. driving rules.
Or the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants that employ migrant children. Talk about individual victims of migrant street crime in New York City, showing photos of a Midtown overtaken by homeless and drug users. The latter ties also in Harris’ time as a prosecutor and Attorney General in California where, same as in New York, many criminals who should have been taken off the street were given bail or simply released in the wake of “woke” law enforcement post-Floyd.
Whenever possible, follow Ronald Reagan, who at the close of his 1980 debate against President Jimmy Carter, asked simply “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” It is a rare American who will be able to answer unequivocally yes. The ones who say “no” are likely to be among middle-of-the-roaders who can swing your way in November.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A 2022 to Remember, Ukraine Edition
Looking back at 2022, at what did and did not happen, really tells us what was important, hindsight and all that.
Things that Did Not Happen in 2022
Joe Biden did not explain why the U.S. is at war in Ukraine.
Any nuclear war.
Regime change in Russia.
Ukraine winning the war.
The Russians running out of missiles, men and tires.
No American diplomacy has been tried to conclude the war in Ukraine.
Things That Did Happen in 2022
Among the things causing the greatest pain are the highest gas prices ever recorded in the United States, topping $5 a gallon across the country at one point. Gas purchases on their own may make up only a relatively small portion of most families’ budgets, but the spike in gas, oil and diesel prices has left businesses with higher costs that will force them to raise prices on their customers and pull back on new investments. It risks a slowdown in consumer spending, as households cut back on other expenditures. Energy is so crucial to the functioning of the economy broadly that the price increases bring along higher prices in many other sectors, only adding to inflation. Meanwhile, U.S.-imposed energy sanctions have played to Russia’s favor economically as oil prices rose. Things may come to a head as winter sets in in Germany and that natural gas from Russia is missed. But that is a domestic German problem the U.S. is likely to simply poo-poo away (once economic powerhouse and U.S. competitor Germany showed its first negative foreign trade imbalance since 1991, a nice bonus for America.) Things got so loose that “someone” needed to blow up the Nordstrom 2 pipeline to make the point with Germany that it may have to do without Russian energy to maintain the fiction sanctions will bring an end to war.
There can be no denying the greatest rise in food prices since May 1979, during the Carter administration. The biggest price rises were in the most basic of goods: egg prices soared 39.8 percent, flour 23.3 percent, milk rose 17 percent and the price of bread jumped 16.2 percent. Chicken prices jumped 16.6 percent, while meat rose over six percent. Fruits and vegetables together are up 9.4 percent. Overall, grocery prices jumped 13.5 percent. And don’t look for relief eating out; restaurant menu prices increased 7.7 percent. Eating at home is the answer, even though rent is up over seven percent. Why is everything so expensive? Food prices are affected by global events, such as the war in Ukraine, which affects the costs of wheat and other core commodities. Prices are biting above their weight because of the largest decline in real wages in four decades, since, you guessed it, the Carter days.
Declines across the stock market have affected not only those who invest or passively hold stock in 401(k)s but the parent companies they work for and shop with. This time last year, January 3, the first day of market trading in 2022, looked like just another day in a stock rally that began when Barack Obama was still president. The S&P 500 hit a record high. Tesla rose 13.5 percent and came close to its own all-time peak. That day turned out to be the end of a market that for over a decade had gone mostly in one direction, the S&P 500 rising more than 600 percent since March 2009. The S&P 500 began the year’s final trading session of the year almost 20 percent below where it was at peak. The year overall was the worst annual performance since when the housing crisis in 2008 took down the market. Central banks drove markets this year because of inflation, which was also pushed by energy prices and massive spending in Ukraine.
There’s some good news to add to the economic dullness and dismalness. NPR reports 70 percent of Americans polled support continuing a range of economic and military assistance to Ukraine. Those polled also supported the statement “that they might have to pay higher gas and food prices if we continue to assist Ukraine,” and said “we should stick with Ukraine for as long as it takes rather than urge them to cede some territory to create a cease-fire.” And the Blackrock investment firm has agreed to help rebuild Ukraine after peace breaks out. Blackrock already coordinates Ukrainian investment in the U.S.
Oh, and there’s more that happened in 2022 to remember. Many large cities experienced their worst crime waves since the 1990s. Covid remains a part of life. The southern border is a mess. Diseases of despair, suicide, alcohol, and drug overdoses have driven a drop in our life expectancy. But we’re not gonna blame all that on Biden, too?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Biden at 500 Days
The Joe Biden administration at about 500 days in office tests the limits of those who claimed 501 days ago “anybody” would be better than Trump. With the threat of nuclear war now well alive, Biden presides over the highest gas prices, the worst inflation, and the saddest stock market in lifetimes. It is not morning in American as much as late Sunday afternoon and raining.
Start with the record breaking vacation time. It became a meme during the Trump years to criticize him for weekends at Mar-a-Lago, and to point out how much the Secret Service paid him for their accommodations. Yet as he marks Day 500, Biden is preparing for another weekend scram, on track to take more vacation than any other of his predecessors. So far since taking office Biden spent 191 days away from the White House vacationing in either of his two Delaware properties, at Camp David or on Nantucket. Trump spent 381 days on vacay but over four years. Go Joe!
And as for those Secret Service room bills, they pay them for every president, as the Service is prohibited from accepting “gifts,” even the free accommodations necessary to protect the president. At Biden’s home in Delaware he charges the Secret Service $2,200 a month rent for a cottage on his property. He made $66,000 in total off the Service in 2013; contemporary figures are not available but they tally up, just like Trump and the others. Hillary bought a second house in upstate New York just for the Secret Service anticipating her victory in 2016.
But what of the time Joe Biden has spent in the office, how have the 500 days gone so far? Biden succeeded primarily in engineering a new form of war in Ukraine, not quite Cold and not quite Hot. Not Cold as in 1945-1989, because American Special Forces may soon be on the ground in Kiev and American ships in the Black Sea, and Ukrainians have boasted how American intelligence and targeting information have killed Russian ships, tanks, and generals. With no regard to what leakage into the global black arms market might mean, Biden is sending billions of top-notch weapons into the nation with the avowed aim of bleeding out Russia. When something like this was tried in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. had the common courtesy to do it through the CIA and keep at least some of it secret. No more. Vladimir Putin, in return, has reminded the world several times he has nuclear weapons he is not all that opposed to using. Joe Biden has succeeded where presidents since 1989 have failed — he sends Americans to bed at night worrying about nuclear holocaust. And that is his greatest foreign policy accomplishment absent the clusterfutz evacuation from Afghanistan and a soon-to-really-happen trip to forgive the Saudis for their sins and become the first president since the 1970s to overtly beg for more oil.
(For the record Trump was the only president in some 20 years who did not start a new war during his term, and the only one in that same rough time period who made an effort to seek peace with North Korea, a country Joe Biden continues to ignore as official policy. When asked in Seoul if he had a message for Kim Jong Un, Diplomat-in-Chief Biden said “Hello. Period.”)
In other Leader of the Free World accomplishments, Biden’s actual leadership was shown when Mexico snubbed him, refusing to attend the Summit of the Americas because Biden would not also invite Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, all Cold War hissy fits Joe is keeping alive for a new millennium. “There cannot be a summit if all countries are not invited,” Mexico’s president said at a press conference. “Or there can be one but that is to continue with all politics of interventionism.” It really is 1980 again! Additional leadership has been shown in Europe, where Germany and France agreed to U.S. demands to stop buying Russian energy but just not for a couple more months, okay? To make it look like something is being leadered around they have stopped buying energy delivered by ship as a face saving gesture, just as they keep lapping up the massive pipeline delivered materials. But Biden did travel twice to Europe and declared “America is back,” so there’s that.
As for domestic achievements, everyone in America knows about Joe’s gas pains, which he disingenuously claims like a hubby caught with lipstick on his collar are not his fault. Biden apparently sees no connection between his sanctions against Russian energy (which seek to remove significant amounts of oil from the world markets) cutting supply at a time when demand is rising, and inflationary prices. The good news is the sanctions on Russia, well, no, it is not good news, Russia is still fighting away in the Ukraine which means the sanctions have so far failed in their primary function. Biden will give them more time apparently, as the U.S. is not seeking negotiations to otherwise curtail or end the fight.
Biden further sees no connection between his failure to anticipate a baby formula crisis and hungry children. A smarter Biden would have one of his interns sit down with The Google today and make a list of everything that is affected by supply and demand, and of those things, jot down which are only made in a single factory. That accomplishment alone would eclipse the rest of Biden’s domestic agenda, which consists today entirely of pretending historic inflation is Putin’s fault.
Of course that last line is not fair, as Joe did finally pass a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill which in no way could have helped contribute to inflation by dumping all that money into an economy still chasing goods scarce from those naughty supply chain issues. Then there was that $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill (less than half of American approve of Biden’s Covid handling) now that everyone feels better which in no way could have helped contribute to inflation by dumping all that money into an economy still chasing goods scarce from those naughty supply chain issues. Plus wages are up, pouring more money into an already inflationary economy.
The media actually listed Joe’s Biggest Achievements for us in case they were hard to pick out, to include appointing a boatload of judges, 80 percent of whom are women and 53 percent are people of color (“judges that reflect our nation”) which in no way reflect our nation and in no way is racist because you obviously fight back against racism and gender inequality by promoting people based on race and gender. Biden also strategically secured America by overturning the Trump ban on transgender people in the military. In fact, the White House brags it has the first majority non-white Cabinet in history, with most women in the Cabinet, including first woman Treasury Secretary, first LGBTQ and Native American Cabinet officials, and first woman Director of National Intelligence as if someone was giving out prizes for those things.
But it is always best to go to the source, the White House itself with its own list of “record firsts” in Joe’s presidency. You can read them yourself, but you’ll run into the same problem everyone else does — it is all boasting with no links, sources or details attached. So we hear Joe was “most significant by economic impact of any first-year president” but with nothing more. Um, okay. A lot of the rest of the stuff, unemployment and child poverty, got better by the numbers but there is not a word about how anything Joe did caused those things. It is kinda like taking credit for a comet on your watch, especially given how much “not our fault” garbage is being tossed around when someone brings up inflation or fuel prices.
As for Democratic issues of importance like gun control, abortion rights, and climate change, the home town stuff, Biden rates a zero. The EPA continues to recommend Flint, Michigan residents use filters in their homes to remove lead. Joe has driven home the idea that unless a president has a super majority in both houses and now, the Supreme Court, you better not expect much from him. Indeed in Biden’s case he can’t even wrangle his own party, with two key Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, stymieing Joe. Biden for his part predicted Republicans would have an “epiphany” after Trump left office, but that has not yet materialized. The expected Democratic midterm loss currently scheduled for November 2022 will not help. And we haven’t even talked about Biden’s Dead Man Walking lifestyle and walk-it-back gaffes.
So it has only been 500 days, plenty of time left. But to date the Biden administration has strained those statements about how anyone but Trump would be a better president.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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