So a funny thing happened last night on 60 Minutes. Actually, lots of funny things happened last night on 60 Minutes, as Jazz and Ed unpacked this morning already. However, Joe Biden proved last night that his incompetence is as deep as it is wide.
The president made another astounding claim that might stick in the craw a bit with the electorate as we come down the home stretch to the midterms. Scott Pelly asked him about the inflation data and whether it’s going to continue to be a problem.
Biden’s answer? Nope. It’s nothing.
It’s just an inch higher. It’s basically nothing. Let’s dissect that a bit, shall we?
First, if you think inflation is a problem now, Joe Biden is here to tell you that this is not the inflation you’re seeing. This is the new normal. This is the new baseline. There’s no going back. Any idea that someday prices are going to come down? Forget about it. In Biden’s reality, this is the good times we’re all experiencing. You’re just too psychologically disturbed to be happy about it. Yes, he said that, too, to Pelley.
As for the inch higher, which you will see in many GOP ads for House and Senate candidates, here is the unspoken part which you’re not being told, but you absolutely know to be true because you’re living it. While it’s true that consumer prices for August, 2022 were a mere .1% higher than July, 2022, the annual rate of inflation for August remained a very stubborn 8.3%. And if you go back a year before that to August, 2021, that year-to year inflation rate was 5.3%. That means since the summer of the pandemic, the overall price of stuff, all of it that you buy, has gone up 13.6%. Just an inch.
By comparison, here’s the data for the four years of August CPI numbers during the Trump years. 2017 – 1.9%. 2018 – 2.9%. 2019 – 2.3%. 2020 – 1.4%. All four years combined, prices went up 8.5%. So Biden’s August inch is basically at the same level in one year as Trump’s entire span in office. But in a vacuum, it’s just a number. How that affects Americans is when you compare that to wage growth.
In the Trump years, August 2017 reported a sluggish .3% increase in wages. August, 2018 showed 2.9%, August, 2019 increased to 3.2%, and then the summer of the pandemic, trying to recover from the national lockdown, back to .3%. That’s a total for four years of 6.7%, and almost certainly would have been higher had there not been the shutdown. So Trump’s August record is 8.5% inflation over four years minus 6.7% wage growth. That equals a 1.8% ‘feels like’ inflation rate. Over the span of four years, that’s .45% a year. If we’re talking inches, that’s what an inch looks like.
Biden’s August scorecard looks much different. His CPI inflation rate for his first two years is 13.6%. His first two years of August wage growth numbers actually make it worse. August, 2022’s number is -2.8%, and August, 2021’s number is -.9%. That’s down 3.7%, meaning Biden’s August ‘feels like’ inflation is 17.6%, ten times the number Trump had in half the time in office.
Diesel, the fuel of distribution and transportation of everything, remains stubbornly high. There really is no downward pressure on the horizon to push prices down except for Americans seeing that 17.6% overall inflation number reflected in the cost of everything and deciding to stop spending money they otherwise would have. That has nothing to do with Biden policies other than it being a negative consequence of Biden’s policies.
When Joe Biden refers to what Americans are going through as just an inch of inflation, he is demonstrating on behalf of the entire Democratic Party that they are tone deaf on the biggest kitchen table issue there is across the country in the closing weeks of the Midterm election cycle. If you were a political strategist, I’m pretty confident you wouldn’t be advising your principal to go with the ‘Let them eat an inch of cake’ strategy.
The weather, regardless of what John Kerry will tell you, is already beginning to change. The leaves are beginning to turn color all over the country, and the days are a little cooler, the nights are a little colder, and the rain showers will soon turn to snow in large parts of the country. People are going to want to heat their homes and will be absolutely stunned at what it’s going to cost them to keep warm this winter. You add that to another inch of inflation that will be compounded in the release of September’s inflation numbers the second week of October, the people who will be facing the coldest winter of all will be Democrats on the Hill facing a voting public that will have an inflated number of reasons with which to throw them out of office.
