President Biden spoke to the AFL-CIO today in Philadelphia. I hate to oversimplify, so let me offer a quotation that captures the thrust of his speech: “I don’t want to hear any more of these lies about reckless spending. We’re changing people’s lives.”Well, with all due respect Mr. President, you did engage in reckless spending with your $2 trillion mistake in March of last year that launched a terrible period of inflation. Economic greybeards in your own party told you not to do it. They told you it was going to trigger inflation.They were right. You were wrong. The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, was wrong. The Fed chairman, Jay Powell, was wrong. Yes, you have changed peoples’ lives — for the worse.You love to talk about middle-income people, and you want to be the most pro-union president in history, but it is precisely those working people whose lives have deteriorated enormously because of your inflation tax. This of course falls most heavily on them for necessities like food and gasoline. Those prices are soaring. You launched it. I know you never want to talk about it, and when you do, you blame everything but your policies. Yet before anybody heard of Vladimir Putin going into Ukraine, your excessive spending and borrowing, which was monetized by the Fed’s money printing, has now landed us most recently with an 8.6 percent consumer price index, with gasoline up 49 percent, food up 10 percent, electricity up 12 percent, and new cars up 13 percent. Just saying, sir, those are life-changing numbers.Middle-income working people will probably have something like a $5,000 increase in their cost of living in the months ahead. They can’t afford it. Their inflation-adjusted real wages have dropped 3 percent.In other words, your reckless spending spree means that people are working harder and getting paid less. Look in a full-length mirror and what do you see? You see the very body that has decimated the middle class with an inflation tax. Today’s producer price index was just as bad as the CPI — maybe even worse. The topline was up 10.8 percent. Prices for goods up nearly 17 percent, for food 13 percent, for energy 45 percent.The worst part is that the three-month change is faster than the 12-month change, which means inflation is getting worse. There’s no peak here.Your Federal Reserve appointee, Mr. Powell, is now left with no choice but to jack up interest rates faster and higher than anybody in government thought necessary. It will lead to recession. It’s already crashing stocks. Inflation expectations are rising, according to the latest NFIB small-business survey and the New York Fed survey.I know you play the blame game, Mr. President. Beside Vladimir Putin, you’re running against something called “MAGA.” All I know, though, are your MEGA economic policy mistakes. Beside your inflationary spending spree, let’s not forget that you wanted an additional $5 trillion social spending bill. Thanks to Senators Manchin and Sinema, you didn’t get it. But you wanted it. You pushed for it. So please quit bragging about deficit reduction. You’ve never met a pay-for in your entire life.Today in Philly, you proudly boasted of your attempts to raise taxes across the board. Thirty-six tax hikes in your FY ’23 budget, 11 on energy alone. That’s $3.5 trillion in total. What a terrific idea: We’re going into recession, and you’re raising taxes. We need more energy, but you want to tax all the fossil fuel companies.Which brings me to my last point: You have decimated the oil and gas business. Your environmental regulations have strangled fracking, drilling, pipelining, LNG exporting, and refining. You canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. You canceled drilling in Alaska. You canceled drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Your EPA has drawn up restrictions that have emasculated not only the fossil fuel business, but infrastructure of all kinds.Right now, oil is badly undersupplied and so is gasoline. These are self-inflicted wounds. You have only yourself to blame. Please, go back to that full-length mirror.You know what, sir? The cavalry’s coming.From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.
