Boom to Bust: How Biden Turned the Economy Around — Into a Debacle

And delivered a 3.4 percent wage cut in the past year, owing to inflation.

AP/Evan Vucci
President Biden at the Detroit Auto Show September 14, 2022. AP/Evan Vucci

It’s bad enough that President Biden held a James Taylor celebratory concert yesterday after a terrible consumer inflation report with soaring prices for food and groceries, electricity, natural gas, cars, medical care — pretty much everything beside a drop in gasoline — with a near 1,300-point stock market selloff and 30-year mortgage rates jumping up to almost 7 percent, decimating the housing sector.

If all that weren’t embarrassing enough, today in Detroit his new word salad reads like this: “We started with the American Rescue Plan. It’s taken us from economic crisis to economic resurgence.”

Hang on a second, Mr. President. Objective observers using actual factoids might put it a bit differently. Namely, you inherited a low-inflation boom, with economic growth of 6.5 percent, and, in a little over a year, you turned it into a high-inflation bust.

It comes with two consecutive negative growth quarters, and a deepening recession likely, and your “American Rescue Plan” with all of its excess spending has triggered a relentless inflation that is forcing the Federal Reserve to aggressively tighten the monetary screws on the economy.

You generated $5 trillion in new deficits, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. You put an end to fossil-fuel permitting and leasing and you’ve implemented at least $200 billion of new regulations, roughly 40 times what President Trump imposed.

It’s a set of actions that has literally strangled business enterprise. Meanwhile, besides your tax and regulatory prosperity killers, your inflation scourge has given average working Americans a 3.4 percent wage cut over the past year.

Around the kitchen table, families are talking about a 16 percent hike in electricity prices, a 33 percent jump in natural gas services, and a 11.4 percent spike in groceries. Families are still looking for baby formula on store shelves.

And — even with the recent drop in gasoline prices, partly induced by your election-year oil selloff from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which of course jeopardizes our energy and natural security — gasoline is still up 26 percent from a year ago.

National gas today is about $3.70. In January 2021, it was $2.40. By the way, don’t take it from me alone about the inflationary recession we’re in. Listen to top Democratic economists like Jason Furman and Larry Summers. They are expecting 6.5 percent  unemployment over the next two years. Right now, it’s 3.5 percent. So, the great middle class is heading for even more pain as a result of the Democrats’ policies.

The fact is that Mr. Biden was handed an economic resurgence by his predecessor Donald Trump and, in short order, he turned that into a crisis. A real crisis.

This stagflation plague that you have forced on us can be fixed with a return to free markets, free enterprise, and supply-side policies to reduce tax rates and slash regulations. Reopen the fossil fuel spigots. Revive confidence in what king dollar can purchase in terms of homegrown goods and services.

We can stop expanding welfare assistance that incentivizes non-work, and replace it with fiscal policies that make it pay, after tax, to work and produce.

Yes, the cavalry is coming. That’s the ultimate way out. But even the best-trained cavalry is still going to probably need a couple of years to fix the Biden mess.

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.


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