OPINION: Biden owns 40-year inflation high

Inflation is raging at an annual rate of 8.5 percent. 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 […]

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Inflation is raging at an annual rate of 8.5 percent. 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 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 his anti-fossil fuel policies that 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 Biden’s 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.

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 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 come due and if Joe Biden and Congress refuse to act in this crisis, the inevitable outcome will be a deep, painful recession which has been how inflation spirals have typically ended.      


Rick Manning is president of Americans for Limited Government (ALG). The organization says it is a “non-partisan, nationwide network committed to advancing free-market reforms, private property rights, and core American liberties.” 

Rick Manning

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