PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: How Biden Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Inflation.
“Government was making the wrong decisions,” Biden told the Atlantic. “As much as 5 or 6 percentage points on the inflation rate were due to oil. Another 5 percent was due to Vietnam. And so you have 10 or 11 percent on top of the inflation that had accumulated since 1932, as conservatives had predicted, and BAM—everything’s gone.”
If those conditions sound familiar, it’s because they are. Inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years—driven in part by the war in Ukraine, rising oil prices, and an unprecedented amount of federal spending—and it risks completely sinking Biden’s presidency just as they sank Carter’s.
Yet the Biden of the 1970s and the Biden of 2022 might as well be two different people, with the latter challenging economic orthodoxy and alleging that new entitlements and stimulus in the form of Build Back Better will actually bring consumer prices down. As a young, reform-minded senator in the 1970s, Biden introduced bills to slash tens of millions of dollars from what believed were ineffective and useless federal agencies and insisted the only way out of America’s stagflation nightmare was massive spending cuts. His 180-degree change reflects the leftward lurch of a Democratic Party and White House staffed with ideologues (many of whom never lived through the 1970s) able to convince a nearly 80-year-old president that everything he once understood about how the economy worked was completely wrong.
* * * * * * * *
After reviewing then-president Gerald Ford’s budget, Biden expressly attacked the White House for not doing enough to address high gas prices and for its tax hikes on corporations, arguing there were better ways to cool demand. During a Senate hearing in 1974, Biden chastised liberals for forgetting “the vast resources of the ocean and their importance to us … [which] range from lobsters to oil.”
Although Biden called for some tax hikes on the margins, his plan to curb inflation was defined mostly by spending cuts. During his Senate reelection campaign in 1978, Biden took out a full-page advertisement in the News Journal, one of the largest newspapers in his home state of Delaware, to promote his “sunset bill” that would force “a thorough and complete review of federal spending programs every four years … [that] would automatically end a program that wasn’t proved useful or effective.”
“The spiraling costs of inflation are ripping into the fabric of American society,” the ad reads. “We must bring these problems under control and the first place to start is with the cost of government.”
Today of course, spurred on by his far left base, Biden sings a quite different tune, proclaiming that inflation-hawk “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” and leading others to wonder: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.