Biden threw a party to celebrate the Inflation Reduction Act on the White House South Lawn even as the latest figures showed that core inflation has continued to rise. Grocery prices had the steepest increase since 1979. Rent prices shot up again and medical costs are escalating.
Even the most loyal media lapdogs could hardly stand this festival of lies. CNN cut away from Biden’s masque of red ink to show what was happening to the stock market. Reuters acidly headlined its coverage, “Biden celebrates ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ as food, rent prices climb”.
So what’s there to celebrate?
The Inflation Reduction Act is a lie. It doesn’t reduce inflation: it actually gooses it. The IRA is another inflationary leftist spending boondoggle that throws billions at green energy and $80 billion at the IRS to audit the middle class in the hopes of balancing out some of the crony cash.
A week after signing the IRA, Biden announced a trillion dollar loan bailout for his party’s base of perpetual grad students. Like the Inflation Reduction Act, this was a massive wealth transfer. Audit the middle class and send the checks to Tesla drivers and sociology grad students. Raise inflation rates with inflationary spending and transfer some of the wealth over to welfare voters.
That’s what the White House was really celebrating.
And the worse inflation gets, the closer Biden and his administration get to their true objectives.
The Biden administration isn’t fighting inflation, it’s deliberately increasing it even as its cronies in the Federal Reserve hammer home new interest rate hikes to force the economy into a recession. This two-step dance destroys savings, wrecks investments and allows for a massive wealth transfer to Democrat donors, special interests and voters. The more that the Democrat majority spends, the worse inflation gets and the more justification there is for higher rates.
If a recession arrives, there’ll be even more justification for government wealth transfers.
That’s the good news that brought James Taylor to the White House and got Joe Biden to put on his best 80s shades and party like it’s 1929. Biden announced that he wanted to be FDR. You can’t be FDR without a Great Depression. Even if you have to create it every step of the way.
“I’m kind of in a position that FDR was,” Biden modestly claimed. FDR’s position was to use the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy as templates for dramatically transforming America through massive spending, socialist controls and crackdowns on conservative political opponents.
So far Biden has managed 2 out of 3.
The Biden administration is not here to “save the economy” so that its titular figurehead can retire to a Delaware basement and then drool softly into a Dixie cup for the next decade. The formula has always been really simple: create the crisis, worsen it, and then exploit it.
Until America has been destroyed and there’s no freedom, only the omnipotent state.
Honest socialists like Bernie Sanders would at least admit that they’re trying to replace the economy with socialism while pursuing massive wealth redistribution. Biden claims to be trying to fix it by giving his base more spending money while interest rate hikes push the economy into a recession in order to keep people from spending more money.
A recent paper by prominent economists warned that unfettered government spending would lead to, “a vicious circle of rising nominal interest rates, rising inflation, economic stagnation.”
But whether that’s a vicious circle or a virtuous circle is a matter of perspective.
From the standpoint of any normal person, it’s a vicious circle, but from the standpoint of a socialist, it’s a grand opportunity to Cloward-Piven the economy as we know it into the abyss.
And make a whole lot of money for an army of politically connected special interests.
Biden is pretending that he’s a firefighter when, like FDR, he’s actually an arsonist in a big helmet and black boots. Inflation is one of the fires being fed to justify tighter government controls and interventions that reduce economic independence and redistribute wealth.
Devaluing money is the traditional tool of totalitarian leftist regimes. Runaway inflation provides them with a pretext for interventions such as wage and price controls, both of which were rolled out during COVID lockdowns on an unprecedented scale and still continue to be statewide.
Inflation is not the administration’s enemy, it’s the best tool for wrecking what’s left of free enterprise. How do you get Americans to accept price controls? Keep feeding inflation so that the prices of everyday goods, of gas and housing climb out of the reach of even the middle class. The Biden administration deliberately pushed up gas prices, threatened the industry with price controls and then dumped oil from the reserve into the market. That was a trial run.
So was the baby formula crisis in which the FDA shut down production and then the Biden administration stepped in to fly in formula from overseas. These trial runs involve government intervention creating artificial scarcity or higher prices by intervening in the production process, shutting down plants or oil and gas leases, and then stomping in to reshape the marketplace.
While inflation is a useful tool, it’s not the only one. The EPA, CDC, FDA, USDA and numerous government agencies with virtually unchecked regulatory powers can dramatically change product availability and price at the macro level leading to demands for further interventions.
COVID lockdowns were the patient zero of this new economy. Seemingly irrational and unjust measures shut down small businesses while allowing Amazon and major retailers to roll on. But there was nothing irrational about it. This was a deliberate strategy to further consolidate the retail sector, concentrating the pain among small businesses before offering them temporary subsidies, and narrowing the retail pipeline to put it even further under government control.Labor disputes in rail lines and UPS allow Democrat unions to shut down the supply chain.
But as they used to say on television, “This was only a test.” Socialism, on a much broader scale than we’ve seen it, is being tested. As destructive as these tests were, that’s still what they are. Anyone living under actual socialism can tell you that it can get much worse. And will.
When that happens, Biden will throw an even bigger party. And we’ll be the ones paying for it.
Good economic and political analysis.
Thank you Daniel. Once again a succinct description of evil leftists marching through our institutions.
This is from a book I’m currently reading about Britain in the 70’s
“‘The intelligentsia, always prone to the liberal rhetoric of catastrophe, has adopted an apocalyptic mood, denying (against the facts) that reformist progress can be made and believing in any case that ecological disaster is just over the horizon.’”
And this:
‘I certainly do notice,’ mused Tony Benn in 1975, ‘how wildly hostile the press is to everything to do with working people, trade unions and young people. It is an extremely dangerous tendency which I have noticed building up over the last few years. Whether it is a move towards fascism is perhaps too early to say.’
And this:
set out by another royal contributor to the debate, Prince Philip: ‘Problems of overpopulation, environmental pollution, depletion of finite resources and the threat of widespread starvation.’ Different too was the political response. Tony Benn was one of the very few senior politicians to acknowledge ‘the real challenge of the ecologists, who are now saying that there must be a major cut in the population, a major reduction in growth, if humanity is to survive’.
There’s lots more too, stop copying our failure. We had Margaret Thatcher to save us, you had Trump but the leftist elites have done their best to destroy him.
Sadly, the leftist efforts to limit world population is not being investigated, it is
a real activity, they want to kill about 85% of the living and are currently doing it.
“If a recession arrives,…” That surprised me, Daniel. We’ve had two quarters of negative growth. The recession arrived a month and a half ago, if you’re being generous, and over seven months ago if you’re not. Have they actually set a new standard, or are they just saying that this, two quarters of negative growth, is not a recession?
You’re right that almost all this is aimed at the middle class, and small business. The poor get their food and rent paid for, and help with their utilities, so inflation will hardly hit them in their necessities. The pay of most government employees is indexed to inflation, and so is the pay of many unions, which greatly defrays the impact of inflation, and is an incentive for unionization., another big democrat objective. They’re taking money from the nonunion private sector, and giving it to their welfare constituents, government employees, and rich cronies.
Yeah, the Inflation Expansion Act redistributes wealth to the moneyed interests which collude with the Dirtbagocrat party and the other parasites who depend on them, as always. It should be renamed the Wealth Redistribution Act. At least that way the stock market might rise during his next campaign party instead of drop straight down like it did during his last party. Not that I give a shit about the stock market.
Brilliant essay but I’m now afraid of commenting at all. You delete so many of my comments. I feel I’m wasting my time here and maybe that’s your intention, to make me go away. If a religious conservative choir is what FPM demands then you would be right, Mr. Greenfield, I don’t belong here.
But isn’t an echo chamber and an obedient choir what Leftism, not Rightism, is all about?
“During the Hitler years — in order to finance the party’s programs, including the war expenditures — every social group in Germany was mercilessly exploited and drained. White collar salaries and the earnings of small businessmen were deliberately held down by government controls, freezes, taxes. Big business was bled by taxes and “special contributions” of every kind, and strangled by the bureaucracy. (Amid “the Niagara of thousands of special decrees and laws”, writes Shirer, ” even the most astute businessman was often lost, and special lawyers had to be employed to enable a firm to function. The graft involved in finding’s one way to key officials … became in the late thirties astronomical.”) At the same time the income of the farmers was held down, and there was a desperate flight to the cities — where the middle-class, especially the small tradesmen, were soon in desperate straits, and where the workers were forced to labor at low wages for increasingly longer hours (up to 60 or more per week).
But the Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument.
Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, socialism. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. “Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.
“To be a socialist,” says Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”
By this definition, the Nazis practiced what they preached. They practiced it at home and then abroad. No one can claim that they did not sacrifice enough individuals. – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedon In America”
Poor little THX. Your beyond boring, repetitive and whiny comments are getting deleted. If true, you should take the hint that the Moderators are no longer tolerating your endless spam and simply bugger off. No one cares about Lenny Peekaboo and his, and your, obsession with Nazis from the Objectivist perspective.
It would appear that no one cares about you over at the Atlas Society either. It wasn’t that hard to find you. Here’s what you wrote some 8 months ago:
“Philosophers now know what Jefferson did not know: that the French Revolution had significantly different intellectual roots than those of the American Revolution.”
Can someone please guide me to a really good essay/s or book/s explaining the the philosophical differences and different philosophical roots of the American Revolution versus the French Revolution?
The religious conservatives I argue with ALWAYS bring up the French Revolution as the perfect example of how dangerous and catastrophic REASON is. The perfect example that REASON devoid of Christianity, of religious faith, results in anarchy, political terror, tyranny, human cruelty, etc..
They argue that the French Revolution is the result of the Age of Enlightenment, the result of reason, and the American Revolution is the result of Judeo-Christianity, the result of faith. I don’t have sufficient knowledge about the philosophical roots of the French Revolution to refute the accusation.”
What a load of……………………….
Anyone respond? Yeah, I thought not. Just like here at FPM. Looks like the “religious conservative choir” just doesn’t care what you have to say.
You are right….you don’t belong here. You never did.
The French Revolution was bonkers. Similar to the Democrats today, not “reason” at all, just off the rails delusional idiots.
Yang: ‘Return to the Obama Years’ Not Enough for Biden — They Were Left Behind in Those Years,’ ‘They’re Pissed Off’
JEFF POOR
Late Tuesday on CNN, former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang, now a CNN contributor, warned that his old opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden could not defeat Trump with just a pledge to return to the years of former President Barack Obama alone.
OBAMANOMICS:
The report observes that while the wealth of the world’s 80 richest people doubled between 2009 and 2014, the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population (3.5 billion people) was lower in 2014 than it was in 2009.
The Obamas tackle climate change and wealth inequality
By John Eidson
In a remarkable commitment to their tireless fight against climate change and wealth inequality, Barack and Michelle Obama reportedly are purchasing a magnificent $15-million oceanfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, presumably as a much-needed retreat to supplement the $9-million mansion they already own in one of the most exclusive areas of the nation’s capitol.
“Big Brother Biden “is a villain and traitor to America and the American people. So much so, let us not be naïve about him, that is possible he would inflect upon American and Americans a socialist /Marxist tyranny if he could.
As the type of tyrannical government as in, the classic novel 1984 by George Orwell that was later made into a movie. In which , is headed by “Big Brother,” who issued a new speak dictionary with taught “Peace is war” and “Love is hate” and “Freedom is slavery” as well as “Ignorance is strength” and that the State headed by Big Brother declared that if it says “2+2 = 5 then it is 5.”
Likewise Big Brother Biden, first declared,” Inflation is strength.”
Now Big Bother Biden proclaims the Economic failure is “Economic success.”
The ancient Greek Philosopher, Plato, did have a good valid point when he had written “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
When applying that wise statement to Joe Biden, his “measure” is more than lacking, it’s outright terrible.
From his wrecking the economy of the United States with is socialist economics he keeps attempting to push on the United States and his always striving against the American free enterprise system. As seen in his shutting down the much needs oil pipeline and at the same time causing many American workers to lose their much-needed jobs and likewise creating a drastic rise in the price of gas.
The true “measure” of Biden on America regarding fuel costs as well as on many other important subjects is nothing less than a horrendous economic catastrophe.
The words “Stop the inflation” really mean “Stop Joe Biden and those hiding “behind the curtains “who uphold and manipulate their puppet “President” Biden to achieve all their sinister goals
The bad economy is because of Joe Biden with is socialist economics meddling and interfering in and destroying the American free enterprise system
For Biden is the epitome and personification of America’s economic disaster in the United States.
High prices for fuel and the gas station and at the grocery store are terrible, and still prices are growing higher. Things will get worse – “thanks” to Biden.
All because of that awful Biden with his socialist economics, he is a disaster for both America and the American people.
That fiend Biden worked against the American oil industry and likewise shut down the American oil pipeline therefore costing US citizens to lose their much need jobs. All of this has to be part of Biden sinister scheme to make the United State dependent on foreign oil.
Biden is, truly, a traitorous treasonous villain.
Joe Biden is responsible for the terribly high cost of gas and groceries with his constant socialist meddling and interfering in the American free enterprise system is only harming America and the American people.
Likewise, “President” pretender Biden when he shut down the Northern oil pipeline industry causing many American workers to lose their much need jobs is a disaster but to make this terrible situation even worse these results to two awful, related things.
It made the United States once against dependent on foreign oil and likewise this added to the already rising prices fuel at the gas station.
That subversive horrible Biden and those “behind the curtains.” Who uphold their stooge in the Office of the US Presidency must have insidious sinister subversive intentions.
They have Biden as their tool for the degradation and debasement of the United States in the Red/Green agenda.
They are a dangerous as they are also despicable.
Joe Biden is the epitome and personification of Inflation.
What’s more, Biden is so very feeble that he can’t even ride a bicycle, how much less is he then able to handle the very important subject of the US economy and any competent way.
It must be that eating ice cream is the only thing that Biden does really know how to do well. Maybe ice cream eating fits his mentally level. For with everything else Biden is a disaster at.
As observed by his always pushing his socialism on the United States and likewise his constant opposing constant interfering and meddling in the American free enterprise economic system which has the terrible results of inflation, the outcome this is seen in those awful high prices for groceries at the store and the high cost for fuel at the gas station.
Biden is an horrendous catastrophe for America’s economy.
This economic calamity is a reflection of the wisdom written down by the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato wrote, “The penalty for refusing to take part in politics is to be ruled men inferior to yourself.”
Redistribution of wealth to the top tier is one of the keys to understanding this stuff, as I only realized recently.
I heard where middle class households lost upwards of $6 trillion in wealth during the 2nd(?) quarter of this year. Where did that money go? Did it just disappear or was it transferred up the line to the top of the food chain? Was it a so-called “correction”? I don’t know enough about macro-economics to figure it out but it appears to me when governments become more involved in free market capitalism it always leads to suffering in the middle class.