Original.
On Thursday, I wrote that the Biden administration was following the Venezuelan approach of treating the inflation it created as some sort of corporate plot by trying to blame high gas prices on energy companies.
As it is, Biden is cynically hoping that Americans will stop blaming him and start blaming corporate conspiracies for high prices. That isn’t likely to happen when people see shortages and high prices everywhere they look. This socialist garbage isn’t even working at the media level.
Biden is lying and flailing, and even in the throes of an economic disaster his political allies created and are actively profiting from, is trying to direct the blame at their economic rivals with the intent of further undermining our economy and to raise prices even more on Americans in order to benefit his Big Green donors.
A few days later, the Biden regime is moving closer to making it official.
The White House took a step in this direction earlier this week, with Biden urging the Federal Trade Commission to escalate its investigation of anti-competitive behavior in the oil and gas industry, which the president alleged was leading to higher prices for drivers at the pump. Administration officials have discussed launching similar measures, with aides discussing calling attention to consolidation in the grocery sector as food prices rise, two people familiar with the matter said.
While there’s plenty of material to work with there, as far as consolidation goes, if the issue were merely consolidation, why are prices rising sharply now?
“The White House is working to make clear inflation is not happening for organic reasons; it’s happening because it’s profitable for enormous corporations to raise prices on consumers,” said Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, a think tank that supports aggressive antitrust policy, who said her views had been made clear to the administration.
And it wasn’t profitable to raise prices in 2018 and 2019?
Two things can be true. Key industries are indeed overly consolidated. The consolidation is largely the work of lefties though which is why these massive multinationals spend much of their messaging capital on virtue signaling. It has nothing to do with the inflation problem.
Biden trying to go full socialist is inevitable. But he lacks the charisma or the bully pulpit to wage that war. And the Democrats going to war with the woke corps who have been financing them, just when they need their money for the midterms would backfire all too easily.
Many economists are skeptical of whether publicly cajoling firms would actually lead them to lower their prices.
Cajoling them to do what? Inflation isn’t something that a few firms invented.
You don’t get inflation under control by telling companies to lower their prices. Sufficient pressure to lower prices would just lead to more shrinkflation and skimpflation to balance things out.
Conservative and even some nonpartisan economic experts say that trends in consolidation since the start of the pandemic do not explain a massive increase in inflationary expectations over the last year.
“Even”.
There’s inflation because companies decided to charge more money because they’re greedy is not a serious economic analysis. It’s socialist virtue signaling by an administration that can’t stop printing money or looking for someone else to blame.
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