Bummer Beyond Belief

Bummer Beyond Belief is my take on the centerpiece of the Biden’s plan to reduce the United States to ruin. His plan to erase our borders has already been implemented to stunning effect. The Bummer Beyond Belief bill complements it perfectly. Bummer Beyond Belief also works as a description of the complete Biden package, so to speak.

The biggest story this week is inflation. Larry Kudlow concisely put it this way: “The increase recorded in consumer prices — soaring 0.9% just for the month of October alone and 6.2% for the past 12 months — is stunning news. It is the fastest pace in over 30 years.”

The numbers released yesterday confirm a trend. The trend has a start date coinciding with Biden’s ascent from the basement to the presidency this past January (see graphic below).

President Biden now peddles his Bummer Beyond Belief bill as an antidote to the inflation his administration has denied and downplayed and set off. Biden has taken up this line: “Seventeen Nobel prizewinners in economics have said that my plan will ease inflationary pressures.”

This is Biden’s version of the statement in the letter dated September 15 that is posted here and here (with two additional signatories). The letter opines: “Because this [BBB] agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”

I seriously doubt it, but note that the statement doesn’t quite say what Biden says it says. No surprise there. And the Bummer Beyond Belief bill has continued to evolve since September 15. However, the accuracy of Biden’s version of the statement is probably above average for Biden.

On February 4, as Biden’s $2 trillion stimulus bill was making its way through Congress, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers took to the Washington Post with a warning:

[W]hile there are enormous uncertainties, there is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability. This will be manageable if monetary and fiscal policy can be rapidly adjusted to address the problem. But given the commitments the Fed has made, administration officials’ dismissal of even the possibility of inflation, and the difficulties in mobilizing congressional support for tax increases or spending cuts, there is the risk of inflation expectations rising sharply. Stimulus measures of the magnitude contemplated are steps into the unknown.

Juxtaposing the 17 Nobel Prize-winning signatories of the letter with Summers, I am reminded of Samuel Johnson’s response to a friend who questioned his ability to carry out his plan to write a Dictionary of the English language by himself in three years when it had required a team of 40 French academics working over 40 years to carry out a comparable task: “Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.”

Biden’s misquotation of the letter beats his attempt to shift the blame to third-parties (Kudlow again):

Now, the White House with its usually penetrating analysis, blames price gouging from oil companies and presumably gas stations. This is exceedingly nonsensical. If this were remotely true, you’d have to have price gouging in: energy, food, shelter, transportation, medical care, sporting events, postage stamps, recreation, used cars, new cars, car and truck rentals, and hotels.

Now, that’s one hell of a conspiratorial price gouging campaign.

The price at the pump is only the most visible of the inflationary effects with which we cope today. That’s why Biden singles it out and suggests it is the result of a malign conspiracy. Yet the price at the pump is also attributable to other incredibly destructive policies that have resulted in Biden begging OPEC for “more” like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.

The editors of Issues & Insight pay tribute to Summers’s prescience here this morning. They write: “We’re not big fans of economist Larry Summers, but in this case, he should be in line for a Nobel Prize for predicting exactly what is happening with inflation today … and who is to blame for it.” They publish their editorial with the helpful graphic below.

Ben White quotes an anonymous CEO in his Politico story on yesterday’s inflation news:

“I don’t think the administration is on top of it at all,” said the CEO of one of the U.S.’s largest companies who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern over angering the administration. “How many people inside this White House really know what inflation is or how it impacts businesses? It’s not really their fault. It’s been so long since we really had it.”

It would be heartening if the CEO would stand up and fight like a man. The Carter administration is not quite ancient history. Indeed, though it has certainly receded from memory, President Carter survives.

Those of us who lived through the Carter era recall that inflation was only part of the catastrophic picture, and so it is today. Jacob Howland’s UnHerd column “How Covid despots humiliated America” is worth reading in its entirety. Inflation is not the subject, or not the only subject, of his column. Rather, Professor Howland places it in the larger context:

A year after Biden’s election, the question of whether anyone really intended to destroy democratic republicanism in the United States is now moot. Forty-six years ago, a headline in New York’s Daily News read “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Today, the Biden administration and its legion of corporate media and big tech allies communicate the same message to the American people so consistently, and so pointedly, that one can only conclude the humiliation of the electorate is a matter of policy. The administration’s undeniable incompetence, fresh evidence of which is forthcoming every day as it squabbles over vaccine mandates and fails to address multiple crises of supply, inflation, and illegal immigration, both masks and serves its managerial method. Not least because the multiplication of crises furnishes a pretext for ever greater extensions of governmental control.

As I say, Bummer Beyond Belief.

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