Joe Biden has come up with all kinds of excuses to try to explain away inflation including trying to blame the invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, despite inflation existing for months before that invasion in February.
But even a former Obama adviser is cutting the legs out of those excuses. Economist Larry Summers who was the Secretary of Treasury under Bill Clinton and the director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama laid a little truth on Joe Biden during an Aspen Institute event.
“We basically had inflation under control for forty years,” Summers said despite all kinds of potential supply shocks to the economy. But “we lost the thread…about a year and a half ago” with “massively expansionary policies relative to the size of the GDP gap. The fiscal stimulus was five times as large as it had been during the financial crisis.”
Gee, what happened about a year and a half ago? In other words, Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus with the “American Rescue Plan” helped to whip up inflation to a frenzy. So Biden — who has been wrong on everything for forty years — gets in and his policies lead to historic inflation that we haven’t seen in forty years. Now, this thought isn’t new. But you know it’s bad when even the Democratic economic advisers are laying it out because they’re more concerned about what’s happening to the country than covering for Biden’s bad moves.
People knew enough over the past forty years how to avoid this. But then Biden comes in and seems not to have a clue about the results of reckless spending, or else he wanted it to blow up. Because it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what would happen. He was getting all kinds of warnings last year, but he still pushed and is pushing more spending.
Summers hasn’t been shy about taking a contrarian view to that of the Biden team’s narrative in the past. He’s previously said he thinks that it was going to be hard for the Fed to engineer a “soft landing” with the raising of interest rates. Translation: things are going to get worse.
As we go into the midterms, this needs to be flagged in every election: the Democratic policies are taking money right out of our pockets — by one count, $4200/average American. Democrats need to be sent a serious message to stop this, by turning them out of office wherever we can.