Someone very wise — I’d give credit if I could remember who it was — instructed us that, “It’s not how you play the game, but how you place the blame.” This is clearly the byword of the thoroughly corrupt Biden administration and of the current left revolutionary Democrat Party that seems to be dedicated to nothing short of dismantling the last great hope of Earth. They’re doing this in the name of, well, in the name of what is not at all clear. Just for the hell of it seems as good an explanation as any.
The Democrats’ latest inflation misdirection play was passage in the House Thursday of a cynical fraud called the Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act.
Republicans share in the blame for this destruction. Their reaction to the comprehensive calamities birthed by Biden & Associates has been weak. Downright timid. With a few inspiring exceptions, elected Republicans tend to the testosterone-challenged. And, honesty requires us to point out, in too many cases are a bit weak in the upper story. And the party has historically been very bad at explaining things that so many Americans don’t understand but need to.
Take inflation (please). The size of the money supply and the pool of available goods and services are related to inflation in as iron-clad a way as the relationship between diet, exercise, and body weight. Increase the money supply without increasing goods and services, and you get inflation. Every. Time. Period. Paragraph.
The cause of the current heading-toward-Weimar-Republic-level inflation that is ravaging the republic and running lives is the incontinent spending of the current administration. Some COVID relief spending was necessary when the plague was at its worst, but the Biden administration spent excessively, taking advantage of the “crisis” to reward various Democrat constituencies with money that we had to print or borrow. The tag team of Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi even paid people to stay home and not work after the worst had passed, further reducing the pool of goods and services Americanos could purchase with all that funny government money. Result — rampant inflation.
All this is as plain as the noses on Joe Biden’s faces. Without a course correction — which has to include reduced federal spending — the American dollar will be worth no more than a Joe Biden promise to bring us all together. In the face of this Biden et al., when they finally brought themselves to admit that inflation was a problem, are trying to blame it on Vladimir Putin, COVID, greedy businesses, Donald Trump, climate change, erectile dysfunction (OK, I made this last one up, but considering the lame Republican response there may be something to this).
The Democrats’ latest inflation misdirection play was passage in the House Thursday — along party lines — of a cynical fraud called the Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act. This deliberate non sequitur seeks to blame “greedy corporations” for the wildly escalating prices of gasoline and diesel fuel, prices caused in fact by government spending and deliberate policies aimed at destroying the domestic gas and oil industries in order to further the brave new wind and solar utopia.
The bill, which faces an uncertain future in the Senate, would give the President authority to issue emergency proclamations that would allow him to fix energy prices. It would also give the Federal Trade Commission power to investigate alleged price gouging by oil and gas companies.
In a flight of lunatic fantasy after the bill passed, Democrat Congresswoman Katie Porter, of the Planet California, crooned: “I’m a proud capitalist, and what we’re experiencing with fuel prices is the result of a broken market. Big Oil executives are bragging to shareholders about price gouging families at the pump. They’re purposely keeping supply low to earn record high profits, squeezing and our entire economy in the process.”
The audacity of this statement leaves one breathless and wondering if Porter is cynical or just stupid. (Both could be true.) It summons up the image of Snidely Whiplash tying Little Nell to the railroad tracks. Thus the Democrats’ policies and their defense of them take on the flavor of a child’s cartoon.
And since the Democrats brought up the issue of gouging, let us linger over it a bit. Accountants and economists and others who measure these things agree that the average oil company profit on a gallon of gas is in or around five cents. The federal tax on a gallon of gas is 18.4 cents, and 24.4 cents on a gallon of diesel. The average state tax per gallon is about 35 cents. So just who is gouging whom?
The dishonest blame game will continue. But there’s no reason for anyone paying attention to take is seriously. The case is there to make against the Democrats’ ruinous economic policies, if only Republicans had the courage and wit to make it.
