President Joe Biden blamed Vladimir Putin for the worst-in-40-years inflation numbers out Thursday. Sorry, Joe: This is February data; the surge in prices came before Vlad invaded Ukraine, which will surely make the March report still worse.
In February, the US inflation rate rose to 7.9%, the highest annual increase since 1982. As a result, real average hourly earnings plummeted 2.6% (the largest drop since the Labor Department started tracking that number) as higher prices ate up nominal raises.
That’s Year One of Bidenomics.
Yet the president’s blame-Vlad denial pointed to an important truth: “A large contributor to inflation this month was an increase in gas and energy prices as markets reacted to Putin’s aggressive actions,” he claimed — which again, will actually be next month’s bad news.
Biden pretends that’s just the price we must pay for “Putin’s unprovoked war,” vowing “the costs we are imposing on Putin and his cronies are far more devastating than the costs we are facing.”
Yet he still refuses to counter a key driver of inflation (pre- and post-invasion) by unleashing the US fossil-fuel industry: Restart the Keystone XL pipeline, stop delaying other pipeline approvals, expedite new oil and gas drilling permits and repeal his punitive regulations. Get America back to being the energy-exporter it became under President Donald Trump.
Send that signal, and the markets will react instantly to the improved expectations, pushing prices down.
Instead, Democrats in Congress (with Biden’s approval) are busy goosing yet another cause of inflation, federal deficit spending. The omnibus bill headed to the president’s desk sends another $1.5 trillion out the door.
The impact of Putin’s war will make things worse, and Americans can accept that. But it doesn’t get Biden off the hook for the inflation that he first wrote off as “transitory,” then blamed on corporate greed and now wants to pin on Putin.
And while it’s outrageous that the president has spent a year denying the facts on inflation, it’s downright obscene that he’s sticking to the policies that make it worse, and now seem likely to cause an outright recession.
