The Other McCain

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Deliberate Dishonesty: Biden Keeps Repeating Lies About the Economy

Posted on | June 3, 2022 | Comments Off on Deliberate Dishonesty: Biden Keeps Repeating Lies About the Economy

The constant refrain from Democrats is that Joe Biden is unpopular because the White House has a “messaging” problem. Nothing is actually going wrong in America, they seem believe, and certainly none of the problems we’re experiencing are the result of Biden’s policies. No, the real problem is that they’re not “getting their message out” effectively.

Keep in mind that practically every major news organization in America — ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, etc. — is entirely in the tank for Democrats, no longer even pretending to be “objective,” but instead pumping out Democratic Party propaganda 24/7. How bad does your “messaging” operation have to be if, in such a friendly media environment, your approval rating is still 13 points underwater?

Despite this incongruity, Democrats remain committed to the belief that “messaging” — and not policy — explains Biden’s upopularity. And so, today, they sent the doddering septuagenarian out today to squint at his teleprompter while he read this astonishing script:

Good morning, everyone. With today’s excellent jobs report and unemployment remaining at a near-historic low of 3.6 percent, I want to speak very briefly today about our economy and what we’re doing to lower the costs for American families.
I know that even with today’s good news, a lot of Americans remain anxious, and I understand the feeling. I grew up in a family about 100 miles from here that if — where if the price of gas went up, you felt it. It was a discussion at the kitchen table.
And there is no denying that high prices, particularly around gasoline and food, are a real problem for people. . . .

Permit me to interrupt and say that today’s employment report was not “good news,” and it certainly was not “excellent.” Also, why was Biden giving this speech from his beach house in Rehoboth Beach? But never mind, his handlers wrote this bit about the “kitchen table” discussion of rising gas prices when he was growing up “about 100 miles from” Rehoboth Beach. Except of course, when Joe was growing up, there was no wild inflation of gas prices. In 1948, when Truman was president and Joe was 6 years old, the price of a gallon of gas was 26 cents. Ten years later, when Joe was 16 and ready to get his driver’s license, the price of a gallon of gas had increased to . . . 30 cents.

So this notion that Joe can totally relate to your problems with gas at $5 a gallon because of the circumstances of his childhood is bullshit, just like everything else Joe says:

But there is every reason for the American people to feel confident that we’ll meet these challenges. Because of the enormous progress we’ve made on the economy, the Americans can tackle inflation from a position of strength. . . .
That purpose that we’ve set out to accomplish and the progress we’ve made, I think, is critical.
At the time I took office, about 16 months ago, the economy had stalled and COVID was out of control.
Today, thanks to the economic plan and the vaccination plan that my administration put into action, America has achieved the most robust recovery in modern history just two years removed from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. . . .

If you were watching that on TV, how could you possibly restrain your urge to throw something at the screen and curse a blue streak? The economy had not “stalled” in January 2021 and COVID was not “out of control.” The “vaccination plan” about which Biden tries to claim credit was actually begun by the Trump administration. The biggest problem in the economy, of course, was that Democrats had demanded complete lockdowns in response to COVID-19. While GOP-run states like Texas and Florida had been more or less open for business since mid-2020, states like California, New York and Illinois had imposed draconian shutdown orders that they kept in place more than a year after Floridians had ditched their masks and gone to back to work. Democrats think the rest of us are too stupid to know any of that, and so Biden (or rather, the people who wrote the script of this speech) supposes that all he has to do is say his administration has made “enormous progress . . . on the economy” and we’ll just nod along as if it were actually true.

Everything’s going just hunk-dory, we’re supposed to believe, and if not, why it’s that wicked Putin fellow’s fault:

The two challenges on the minds of most working families are prices at the pump and prices at the grocery store. Both of these challenges have been directly exacerbated by Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The price of gas is up $1.40 since the beginning of the year when Putin began amassing troops at the Ukrainian border. This is the “Putin price hike.”
Putin’s war has raised the price of food because Ukraine and Russia are two of the world’s major breadbaskets for wheat and corn — the basic product for so many foods around the world.
Ukraine has 20 million tons of grain in storage right now, and it’s been in storage since the last harvest. Normally, that would have already been exported into the world market. But because of Putin’s invasion and a blockade of the port at which they could take that grain out for the rest of the world, it’s not. It’s not.
And look, I understand that families who are struggling probably don’t care why the prices are up. They just want them to go down. “Joe, what are you going to do to bring them down?” But it’s important that we understand the root of the problem so we can take steps to solve it.
I’ve been up front with the American people from the outset that there would be a cost here at home of Putin’s decision to brutally and savagely invade a sovereign nation.
But as your President, I remain committed to doing everything in my power to blunt the impact on American families, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.
I led the world to coordinate the largest release of global oil reserves in history — 240 million barrels — to boost global supply and keep prices from rising even more.
I directed the sale of gasoline using homegrown biofuels this summer.
And I’m working closely with our European partners to get more of the grain locked in Ukraine right now out into the world market, which could help bring down prices. There’s ways to do that over land, which we could talk about at another time.
But actions have already helped to blunt that — what would have been an even larger Putin price hike.
And as I said, I’m going to continue to use every tool available to me to further blunt those price hikes as we move forward.
But the fact is this: There’s more than one way to solve this problem. If food and gas prices are going to be elevated by Putin’s price hike, one way we can make things a little better for families is by helping them save on other basic items their family needs on a monthly basis, like their utility bills, their Internet bills, their prescription drug bills, and other costs like housing.

You see here that “Putin price hike” got repeated three times in the span of about two minutes, as if there had been no inflation before Putin invaded Ukraine, and as if Biden’s own policy — i.e., doing everything he could to shut down domestic petroleum production — had nothing to do with the high price of gasoline. For that matter, would Putin have invaded Ukraine if Biden hadn’t signaled weakness by his botched retreat from Afghanistan? Nothing Biden did prior to the invasion had any deterrent effect on Putin for the simple reason that Biden’s incompetence is as obvious to Putin as it is to anyone else. Putin doesn’t respect Joe Biden, because nobody respects Joe Biden. Insofar as the Ukraine war has contributed to inflation, then, that’s Biden’s fault, too.

Of course, the people who write Joe’s speeches don’t think we’re smart enough to figure this out, so they stick “Putin’s price hike” in the script three times, figuring that if Joe repeats it often enough, we’re eventually going to start believing it’s actually true. Skipping ahead in Joe’s speech:

I’ve laid out a plan to lower the cost of everyday goods that move through our supply chains to stores and families’ doorsteps.
For example, at the State of the Union, I called on Congress to crack down on foreign-owned shipping companies that have raised their prices to transport goods by as much as 1,000 percent. One thousand percent. And that obviously raises the cost of the goods on those ships to consumers.
The Senate has passed legislation, and I am hopeful the House can do the same to send me legislation in the coming weeks to crack down on these companies and help lower overall costs.
And my plan does all this without raising a penny in taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year and without raising the deficit at all by taxing the super wealthy and big corporations, like the 55 major corporations that don’t pay a single penny in taxes, even though they had a — $40 billion in profits.

It was at around this point of the speech that I walked outside to smoke a cigarette and try to calm down. The idea that there is some vast amount of revenue to be gotten by “taxing the super wealthy and big corporations” is one of those pie-in-the-sky beliefs that Democrats cling to like a religion. In fact, if you hike the marginal rates on “the super wealthy,” they will just take their money out of the U.S. economy and put it somewhere with lower taxes. That is to say, confiscatory tax policies will encourage disinvestment and “capital flight” and — at a time when the shrewdest investment gurus are warning of an economic “hurricane” — this is not what you want to encourage, unless you’re a complete imbecile like Joe Biden. And, just incidentally, Biden’s proposal to punish foreign shipping companies is just a lot of ignorant noise. The price of shipping has gone up because the cost of shipping has gone up. If it were sheer greed that caused the price increase for shipping, don’t you think some eager shipping operators would take advantage of the situation by undercutting the competition to grab a greater market share?

Nobody has ever accused Joe Biden of understanding economics, and if there is anyone else in his administration who does understand economics, I’d like to know the name of this person, so I can ask them why the hell they haven’t quit in disgust by now. Certainly, no one who understands economics could be under the delusion that “messaging” is the core problem of Biden’s presidency. No matter what clever rhetoric they write for Biden to read from his teleprompter, the underlying reality is unchanged, and that reality is that Biden is the Worst President Ever.




 

Category: Economics, Joe Biden

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