Opinion: Another Year of Bidenflation, Another Year of Errant Democrat Policy

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

The Biden-Harris regime should be embarrassed. The latest inflation numbers are out, and they don’t look good.

Core inflation – a general inflation estimate tool that leaves out volatile things like gasoline, food and beverages – is up 3.8% per year. And that means that when you add in those cleverly-removed items – you know, all the things you really spend your money on, day in and day out – your real inflation level is still well over 10%. And that’s now, after it’s settled down a bit from the double-digit nightmare levels of the first two years of the Biden-Harris operation.

The regime says they’ve been trying to attack this problem, but if they have, it’s a half-hearted effort at best. Their entire plan seems to be based on begging the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.

Particularly interesting is how the official line includes the claim that “Republicans don’t have a plan for tackling inflation.”

It might seem flippant if the Republicans were to respond, “We don’t need a plan; we didn’t cause it. Our mere return to power alone would solve the problem” – but it would be true.

Inflation can be calculated many different ways, and none of them are favorable to the current regime. Democrat rule has done a number on this economy. A double digit number.

There are many causes for this three-year-long national nightmare – energy prices, unemployment, a skyrocketing minimum wage, destructive regulatory mandates, some very big, very destructive union contracts, massive stimulus payments and welfare expansion, the crime wave, the student loan “forgiveness” disaster, and the illegal immigration explosion – but energy is the biggest single item, the one that drives all the rest. Fixing the manmade energy disaster would get us halfway there.

This isn’t about Joe Biden alone, or even about his regime alone. The entire Democratic Party is virtually unanimous on these issues, so even if the DNC were to replace Biden on the ticket, there would be no change in policy. And it’s their policies that are causing these problems – not the man.

Energy

The Democrats have declared war on the energy sector. They’ve raised oil field leasing fees, slow-walked or denied drilling rights on federal land, and reduced the future value of petroleum by forcing the automakers to sunset their fuel-burning automobile and truck lines.

They’ve stood in the way of exporting our natural gas, and they’ve continued their efforts to wipe out the use of coal. In their place, the Democrats have used their power to force the widespread installation of highly inefficient substitutes – solar and wind – from coast to coast.

As a result, energy costs have skyrocketed, not only for us private consumers, but for the manufacturers, retailers, distributors and every other commercial consumer as well. If you think your car’s gas bill has jumped, imagine what has happened to the fuel budgets of trucking companies, malls, and factories. They have to pay for these increases somehow; they’re in your increased prices.

And yes, this one sector is the fundamental driver of our inflation crisis.

Regulatory Mandates

On a related note, it’s not just the regime’s direct assaults on oil, gas and coal production that are causing cost increases. It’s also their indirect assaults through controlling the products we need in life.

By forcing the automakers to concentrate on making expensive Electric Vehicles (EVs) rather than fuel-efficient gasoline-powered cars and diesel trucks, they cause the cost of transportation to jump. By banning efficient single-stage gas furnaces and forcing us to use much more expensive models, they cause the cost of our homes to jump. By banning the installation of gas ovens, water heaters and dryers in new homes and businesses, they cause housing and commercial real estate to become more expensive.

And for what? There’s no legitimate reason or constitutional authority for any of these crippling mandates.

The Minimum Wage

Our major cities have seen a constant effort to double the minimum wage over the past few years, and even in states that didn’t go that far by law, the Covid economy caused it to happen anyway. As a result, as entry level wages increased, often doubling in just a couple of years, the unavoidable results that every economist has always predicted from such errant policy have naturally come to pass.

When an employer has to pay more for each individual employee, he can’t hire as many of them, and when they get promoted, there isn’t enough money to give these higher positions much of a raise. The unavoidable result is greater unemployment and career stagnation for the employed.

So it is that these higher wages for the entry level have indeed meant both less hiring in general and fewer advancement opportunities over time.

Stimulus Payments and Other Welfare

From the very beginning of the Covid shutdowns, the Democrat-run Congress started pushing huge payments – $300 here, $1200 there, and the (illegal) forgiveness of outstanding student loans – which both flooded the country with money (directly reducing its value) and got working Americans accustomed to appreciating government handouts.

Traditionally, most real Americans were too proud to file for government handouts even when they legitimately qualified for them; the Democrats have used this method to get regular Americans comfortable with waiting for a government check. A horrible precedent.

Today, both the federal government and numerous state and local governments too are paying countless millions to hotels, food service providers, hospitals, airlines and bus lines too, all to fund the millions of illegal aliens that the regime has illegally invited into our country. Not only does this waste massive amounts of taxpayer money, contributing to both price inflation and the devaluation of the money Americans already had in savings, but it also contributes to making all these industries dependent on government for their income. Private companies, becoming dependent on the public trough instead of customer relationships within the private sector. This too is terribly destructive to a market economy.

The Crime Wave

Years of Democrat softening of our criminal justice system have had a terrible impact. Part of it is obvious – catching the same criminal, jailing him, releasing him, and catching him committing another crime, again and again, costs far more in police and court budgets than catching, convicting, and imprisoning him for a long time so he can’t commit more crimes and doesn’t need repeat processing.

But it’s the other part of it that’s especially inflationary. All this added crime causes tax increases to pay for police – and causes neighborhood blight which destroys both private and commercial real estate value – and causes higher insurance rates – and causes employers to flee, which uproots their employees.

Crime either drives retailers out of a neighborhood or causes them to build the cost of “shrinkage” into their sales prices, so you pay more when you buy their goods.

The cost of crime isn’t just in terms of the articles stolen; the cost of crime is measured in terms of the added cost burden it places on people, and neighborhoods, and the job market, and your quality of life. Even if you’ve never personally been robbed or mugged, crime has increased your insurance bills, increased your commute, raised your rent, and raised the prices of the groceries you buy.

The Republican Plan

Is there a single Republican plan on inflation? No, there cannot be. Inflation is caused by all these things and more, so inflation can’t be solved by a single move (though tackling energy first, on Day One, would get us halfway there).

But it’s easy to see what these many causes have in common: they are the destructive policies championed by the Democratic Party, and fought against, unsuccessfully, by the Republican Party.

So to an extent, it really is truthful to say that simply electing Republicans to office, both at the state and federal levels, is the best thing America can do to fight inflation.

But inflation isn’t just something you just have to stop. It’s something that must somehow be undone, if possible, and with every year that goes by, that becomes more and more impossible.

When employers address the higher cost of living with a cost of living wage increase, that locks in a higher cost level for the employer, perpetuating that inflation rate through higher prices charged by that employer for the goods he sells.

With every year that goes by, these price increases move from temporary to permanent, and that means your money – your savings, your investments, your 401K, anything denominated in money – becomes permanently worth less.

We can’t turn that clock back. The hundreds of thousands of dollars that most American families – each – have lost are gone forever.

So our goal must be to make up for it, through an economic boom. We need growth – real growth – that outstrips inflation. We need earned wage increases that surpass our real cost of living explosion, not the much lower percentages that have been estimated for the public.

No Democrat administration, not the current one or any conceivable future one, will take the right steps to accomplish these ends, because the only path to prosperity depends on undoing the many errant policies of the Biden-Harris years.

What’s the Republican plan? Identify all the Biden-era executive orders, regulations and bills that have caused this mess, and repeal them. All of them.

Before there’s nothing left of this country but a pile of smoking ashes where the warm and crackling flame of a vigorous economy once proudly burned.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo