New York Post, March 6, 2024

Joe Biden’s State of the Union ‘shrinkflation’ swindle 

Since Joe Biden became president, the dollar’s purchasing power has shrunk by 18% as Americans suffered the worst inflationary ravages since the Carter era. But that plunge is trivial compared with the nation’s real affliction: Snack companies “charge you just as much for the same size bag of potato chips, only there’s a helluva lot fewer chips in it,” Biden declared Tuesday.

Has the Biden re-election campaign finally found its silver bullet? Biden is expected to vigorously denounce “corporate greed” in Thursday’s State of the Union address. The White House apparently believes that scapegoating corporate executives will magically redeem the reputation of Bidenomics.

Shrinkflation — charging the same price for a smaller product — is Team Biden’s great hope. Politico reported, “The White House has been aggressively testing out the [shrinkflation] messaging on the airwaves and in internal polling ahead of Biden’s speech.”

A couple years ago, the White House raged when malcontents responded to soaring gas prices by slapping “I Did That!” stickers with Biden’s face on gas pumps.

Will Team Biden be distributing millions of stickers with the logo “THEY DONE THAT!” showing weaselly corporate executives, to attach to grocery-store checkout lanes?

The White House wants Americans to take a loftier perspective on the president’s record. The Biden administration trashed Americans’ privacy by unleashing the FBI and other agencies to ravage the Fourth Amendment. The Biden White House bludgeoned the First Amendment by browbeating Twitter and Facebook into censoring Biden critics. Biden is expanding and unleashing the IRS to hound far more hapless taxpayers.

But Biden is good on cookies. “Sesame Street” star Cookie Monster bashed food companies this week on Twitter/X: “Me hate shrinkflation! Me cookies are getting smaller.”

Biden invoked Cookie Monster’s message and seconded his rage because “his cookies are getting smaller, paying the same price.” (Let’s hope the “smaller cookies” did not involve any untoward metaphors.) The prez declared: “I was stunned when I found out that’s what actually happened.” He condemned corporations for “charging folks more and more for less and less.”  But unlike governments that force people to pay more taxes for worse services, corporations cannot conscript their victims.

Does Biden believe smaller cookies prove the need for a bigger federal government? Will Biden recruit a new American Protective League (notorious during World War I) to send out spies to carefully measure and weigh cookies across the land?

Will there be a series of TikTok ads with beefy people wearing undersized “Biden for President” T-shirts and bitterly lamenting they bought a cookie with only 622 calories?

In his 1928 presidential campaign, Herbert Hoover supposedly promised “a chicken in every pot.” But will Biden anchor his re-election campaign on Americans’ entitlement to cookies the size of airplane flotation devices? Heck, even President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle at least went through the motions of condemning mass obesity.

Biden’s push for the big cookies can also turbo-charge another initiative he may announce in the Thursday speech: a crackdown on health-care costs. Safeguarding the sale of giant cookies could boost the number of diabetics — thereby boosting the number of people counting on Biden to save them from the high cost of insulin.

Biden is correct that plenty of corporations have reduced the size of their products without curbing their price. I have noticed numerous food products I buy that formerly contained 1 pound have downsized to 15 ounces. As long as the product is clearly labeled, I have no grounds for howling (muttering is a different story). I don’t know the details of the specific price pressures those companies may face, but I can usually find a substitute if their prices seem predatory. On the flipside, shopping for a used car nowadays makes the cash in my pocket feel almost as worthless as Confederate currency.

Shrinkflation and many other problems are the bitter harvest of Bidenomics. But no matter how many wrenches Biden has thrown into the nation’s economy since January 2021, he considers himself blameless for all the disruptions and dislocations he has sowed. Biden long ago awarded himself the same waiver of liability on the economy that the feds gave Pfizer for its COVID vaccines. The national debt is increasing by a trillion dollars every 100 days, creating a potential economic catastrophe that could blow all the chips out of that snack bag.

In his Super Bowl ad denouncing shrinkflation, Biden declared, “The American public is tired of being played for suckers.” So Team Biden decided to treat people like village idiots instead? Will the biggest shrinkflation of 2024 be Biden’s vote count in November?

James Bovard’s latest book is “Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.”