by James Bovard, FFF February 2025
High inflation spurred Donald Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris last November. The economy was the top issue for most voters, and inflation was the top economic issue. As Biden’s partner in economic crime, Harris could not escape the blame for the torpedoing of the dollar’s value in recent years.
Inflation occurs when the government prints excessive currency, resulting in more money chasing the same amount of goods and services. Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich Hayek wrote, “Inflation is never an unavoidable natural disaster; it is always the result of the weakness or ignorance of those in charge of monetary policy.” As economist Per Bylund observed, “Inflation is money losing its purchasing power.” Government is the premier profiteer of inflation, providing politicians with “free” money to spend while systematically defaulting on any debts government promised to pay.
Biden inflation lies begin
In July 2021, Biden declared, “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist.” Actually, there were plenty of dire warnings. In December 2021, Biden scoffed at inflation as a “bump in the road.” But that “bump” became a hole in the gas tank for tens of millions of Americans who drive to work as fuel prices set one record after another. Biden claimed inflation is a problem everywhere, but National Public Radio reported that “between 2019 and 2021, the United States saw one of the biggest inflation rate increases in the world, behind only Brazil and Turkey.” Rep. Lance Gooden (R–Texas) noted, “Joe Biden promised $2,000 stimulus checks but gave Americans $5,000 per year inflation instead.”
Biden spawned the highest rate of food inflation since the Nixon administration, but he scoffed when a CNN interviewer recently asked him about the 30 percent rise in grocery prices. Biden ridiculously declared of consumers, “They have the money to spend!” Exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden quipped that the White House was trying to defuse anger by “telling people no, no, a shopping cart full of groceries has always cost $36,000.”
Biden’s pro-inflation policies divided Americans between those who work for a living and those who vote for a living. In 2021, Biden boasted, “Even after accounting for inflation … our families have more money in their pockets than they did before the pandemic.” Putting more unearned dollars in people’s pockets was a windfall for politicians, but it worsened economic disruptions. Besides, it was scant consolation to have more dollars that purchase less and less each month.
Experts kindly offered plenty of financial remedies to hard-pressed Americans. For Thanksgiving 2021, the Federal Reserve recommended that people rely on soybean-based dinners instead of turkey — saving 76 cents a serving. Georgia Democratic Party leader Stacey Abrams touted abortion as a cure for inflation: “Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas, it’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs. For women, this is not a reductive issue.” Professor Teresa Ghilarducci, in a Washington Post op-ed, recommended that families with an income less than $289,000 per year “adjust” to inflation by eating lentils instead of meat, ditching their car and taking public transit, and maybe letting their pets die. In October 2022, Biden implied that soaring food prices wouldn’t be a real problem if Americans bought no-name, store-brand Raisin Bran instead of Kellogg’s.
Biden’s media whores
Pro-Biden media outlets painted inflation as practically a divine blessing that Biden is bestowing on Americans. MSNBC tweeted, “Why the inflation we’re seeing now is a good thing,” while The Intercept went whole-hog on soaring milk prices: “Inflation is Good for You.” The Washington Post editorial board rushed to absolve Biden: “The main reason inflation is at its highest level since 1982” is because “people continue to spend a lot of time at home” and demand more goods. MSNBC anchor Joy Reid claimed in November 2022 that inflation was a word that Republicans “taught people…. Most people would have never used that word ever in their lives are using it now because they’ve been taught it.” The same month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen blamed inflation on citizens frustrated by lockdowns who “suddenly started splurging on goods.” Most pundits dismissed or disdained people who complained about how the 20+ percent inflation of the Biden era harmed their families. Author Tom Woods noted that leftists “are now mocking people who are concerned about price inflation by using the expression ‘burger too expensive.’”
NPR ran a tear-jerking piece headlined: “The Movement To Stick Inflation Blame On Biden.” After disparaging the “I did that!” stickers of Biden’s face being attached to gas pumps and other places, NPR lamented, “It’s not just vandals, pranksters, and TikTokers trying to stick inflation blame on Biden.” After admitting that real wages for workers fell 2.4 percent last year, NPR consoles, “It’s A Crummy Time To Be A World Leader.”
But inflation was much worse than Biden or the media admitted. Beginning in the 1980s, the formula for calculating inflation was revised dozens of times, almost always with a downward bias. The Consumer Price Index is skewed because it does not attempt to compare the price of the same basket of goods over time. Instead, federal officials concocted a gauge they claim measures a “constant level of satisfaction.” But who in hell made bureaucrats the supreme judges of happiness?
In addition to that bureaucratic fairy dust, the inflation formula was changed to severely underweight rises in housing prices, instead relying on “the new concept of homeowners’ equivalent rent, where the government would estimate how much it would cost to own your own house,” John Williams, the founder of Shadow Stats, observed. The average monthly mortgage payment on a median-priced home has doubled since Biden took office.
Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, observed that if the feds used the same inflation gauges during Biden’s administration that were used in the 1970s, Biden’s peak inflation would have been 18 percent, twice as high as the reported number and the highest inflation rate in U.S. history. Understating inflation permitted the Biden administration to deny much of the financial damage it inflicted.
Biden portrayed himself as inflation’s biggest victim. “Inflation is the bane of our existence,” Biden lamented to a talk show host in June 2022. Unfortunately, he was referring to inflation’s effect on his approval ratings, not the plight of average Americans struggling to pay for gas and groceries. When Peter Doocy of Fox News asked about the impact of inflation in January, Biden called him “a stupid son of a bitch.” The Biden administration presumed that giving more handouts to government dependents would ease the pain of self-reliant middle class families — perhaps by osmosis.
Economic hocus pocus
Biden’s policies were based the “Magic Bean School of Political Economy.” His policymakers favor Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) — the notion that government spending almost never has an adverse effect on the economy. MMT advocates believe there is practically no problem that cannot supposedly be solved by bigger gushers of free government money. A Washington Post headline captured the administration’s presumptions: “Biden’s big bet: That he can remake economy with no bad side effects” such as “less incentive to work.” But as USA Today reported, “Many people have permanently stopped working, depressing labor force participation” by millions of people. Labor force participation has fallen sharply since 2019.
MMT champions are adamant that the flood of new money is irrelevant to rising price levels. In a March 2022 speech to Democratic members of Congress, Biden raged at being blamed for inflation: “I’m sick of this stuff!… We have to talk about it because the American people think the reason for inflation is the government spending more money. Simply. Not. True.”
Biden sought to deflate the political peril by demagoguing against corporations for raising prices. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden found a new culprit: “Make no mistake, inflation is largely the fault of Putin.” But inflation was already at 7 percent before the invasion of Ukraine. Biden began denouncing the “Putin Price Hikes,” but polls showed that few Americans swallowed that assertion. In June 2022, the Washington Post reported that Biden was blaming his White House aides for his problem with inflation: he “complained to aides that they were not doing a good job explaining the causes of inflation and what the administration is doing about it.”
In the final weeks of the 2022 midterm congressional campaign, Biden boasted of the impact of inflation — at least on voters pocketing federal checks. He told senior citizens in Florida, “On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks.” In reality, Social Security benefits have increased every year since 2016. The White House tweeted: “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership.” Even CNN derided that comment, since Social Security benefits are linked to inflation by law. Actually, the benefit boost was the largest in 40 years.
According to Biden, “shrinkflation” — adjusting for inflation by selling smaller products for the same price — is a worse crime than anything his administration inflicted on the American people. Biden condemned corporations for “charging folks more and more for less and less.” In his 2024 Super Bowl ad denouncing shrinkflation, Biden declared, “The American public is tired of being played for suckers.” Politico reported, “The White House has been aggressively testing out the [shrinkflation] messaging on the airwaves and in internal polling ahead” of Biden’s State of the Union speech. But unlike governments that force people to pay more taxes for worse services, corporations cannot conscript their victims. Biden’s attempt to persuade Americans they were being crucified on a cross made of shrinking candy bars failed.
Biden sought to “fix” inflation the same way he “solved” other debacles: with brazen lies that presumed his listeners are either idiots or NPR junkies. As voters focused more on the losses of their purchasing power, Biden repeatedly declared in early 2024 that the inflation rate was 9 percent at the time he took office — almost six times the actual rate. Biden’s credibility deteriorated even faster than the value of the U.S. dollar.
Policymakers ignored the devastation they inflicted. When asked during a January 2022 news conference about how “inflation affects different groups of Americans,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said he wasn’t “aware of … inflation literally falling more on different socioeconomic groups…. The point is some people are just really prone to suffer more.” Inflation sounded like a problem that therapists must solve. In reality, lower-income households spend a far higher percent of their income on food, gas, and heating their homes — three categories where prices have soared. A survey by Lending Club in early 2022 found that “61 percent of the U.S. population lived paycheck to paycheck, up seven percentage points since the first report in June 2021, including 77 percent of consumers earning less than $50,000.” In October 2022, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas reported that most American workers had suffered the harshest fall in wages in 25 years, including a “median decline in real wages” of more than 8.5 percent.
Biden’s attempt to portray himself as an innocent bystander to the destruction of value of the U.S. dollar was a disastrous flop. The president suffered political “death by a thousand price hikes,” as consumers blamed Biden each time they hit the gas pump or grocery store.
When Kamala Harris signaled that she would likely continue Biden’s policies across the board, voters recognized that she had learned nothing from Biden’s debacles. The Harris campaign believed that perpetually championing the right to abortion would guarantee them more than enough votes from women. But it turned out that “women buy milk and eggs more often than they get abortions.”
A century ago, Americans clearly recognized the moral implications of inflation. Vice President Calvin Coolidge bluntly declared in 1922: “Inflation is repudiation.” But it remains to be seen whether the inflationary torrent of recent years will awaken Americans to the folly of trusting Washington to not sabotage their personal independence or the nation’s prosperity.
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