By Richard Manning
Inflation is raging at an annual rate of 8.5 percent up from 7.9 percent last month. March’s extremely hot price growth of 1.2 percent pushes the nation’s inflation rate to levels not seen since the first few months of the Reagan administration in May, 1981.
Unfortunately, President Joe Biden has no idea why prices are out of control, even though he is the only person in Washington who was in the Senate when inflation last was raging in the 1970s.
During his 15 months in office, we have heard Biden dismiss inflation, call inflation transitory, and now blame it on Putin and anyone else he can find.
What Joe Biden doesn’t seem to understand is that when you set the inflation house on fire and keep pouring gasoline on it through federal spending schemes, anti-energy policies and failed foreign policies, you don’t get to blame the guy down the street for fanning the flames you allowed to consume most of the house.
Here is the truth. It is Joe Biden’s unnecessary 2021, me too, COVID spending extravaganza which lit the inflation fire. It has been Joe Biden’s anti-fossil fuel policies which discourage domestic production and deny pipeline infrastructure to move oil and natural gas around the country which figuratively poured gasoline on that inflation fire. And it is his disastrous pro-Iranian, anti-Saudi and Israel, Middle East foreign policy which has turned the world’s largest producer of crude, Saudi Arabia, from allies on most things to at best disinterested observers, resulting in their unwillingness to increase the world’s oil supply.
Just this week a brutal parody of the President and Vice President appeared on Saudi television mocking Biden. An unheard of action in a formerly allied country where the media is pretty much state controlled. This follows the Saudi’s refusal to increase oil production after a direct appeal from the President and later, a refusal of Saudi leaders to even take President Biden’s phone call recently.
While shocking to see this turn of events, it is understandable given the President’s decision to take Iranian backed Yemen-based terrorists, the Houthis, off the terrorism list the first day of his presidency, followed by his decision to pull Saudi Arabia’s missile defense even as the Houthis engage in daily attacks on their oil fields and cities. When coupled with active attempts by the Biden administration to undermine the Abraham Accords, and the on-going kowtowing to Iran providing money and resources to the Mullahs and their terrorist proxies, it is obvious that the limits on Saudi oil production are a direct payback for Biden’s undeclared war on the House of Saud.
Congress needs to take back control over spending in America by rejecting any new COVID bailouts, including but not limited to the Restaurant Restoration Act which would add $40 billion in new spending and impose a freeze on the growth of all regularly appropriated spending until inflation is wrestled to the ground.
Congress should also send a direct message to the Biden administration by opposing their on-going negotiations with Iran, which are rumored to include a $90 billion payment to the terrorist Iranian regime.
Congress should have a fight over Biden’s disastrous domestic energy policy every single day and make Joe Biden and the Democrats feel the political pain because of what their policies are doing at the pump.
In short, it is time to stop spending, restore domestic energy development and abandon the crazy Biden-Iranian Mullah alliance. There are things that can be done to fight inflation, the sad fact is that Joe Biden is either incapable or unwilling to do them.
To get inflation under control, it will take a major attitude adjustment amongst many of our political class. For years, Democrats and some Republicans in Washington accepted the idea that they could spend unending amounts of money with no one paying the bill. Now that inflation bill has now come due and if Joe Biden and Congress refuses to act in this crisis, the inevitable outcome will be a deep, painful recession which has been how inflation spirals have typically ended.
You will know that Biden is getting desperate when he takes a cue from his first term in the U.S. Senate, when then President Gerald R. Ford fought inflation by urging everyone to wear a Whip Inflation Now (WIN) button.
I can see the hashtag already.