New York Post, September 10, 2022

Biden’s economic victory lap is 58 pages of malarkey

The latest Biden victory lap is the administration’s most shameless strutting of 2022. The White House Friday issued a 58-page Biden-Harris Economic Blueprint that claims to have performed more miracles than accompanied the Sermon on the Mount.

Biden is still trying to take credit for job growth that happened only because of the end of lockdowns. In fact, his “success” is really a failure — as fewer people are working now than before COVID.

It’s just one of the many whoppers packed into this ridiculous piece of propaganda:

CLAIM: “The Administration’s economic agenda has created deep incentives for . . . workforce training.”

FACT: Federal job training programs have been a fiasco since the Kennedy administration. A training program created by Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act spent $386 million but placed only 397 trainees in jobs.

CLAIM: “The Administration led the world in an historic release of oil from global reserves.”

FACT: Biden knows that high gasoline prices endanger Democratic control of Congress in the mid-term elections so he has emptied almost half of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Former Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette condemned Biden’s policy: “It’s not a supply emergency, and the only emergency I can see . . . is a political emergency.”

CLAIM: “The Administration has taken critical steps forward in . . . improving our immigration system.”

FACT: The administration has effectively opened the southern borders, enabling millions of illegal immigrants to enter the nation and begin collecting federal benefits. Biden and most of the nation’s media have ignored the resulting chaos in Texas, Arizona and other states.

CLAIM: The Biden administration “provided targeted student debt relief as part of a comprehensive effort to address the burden of growing college costs . . .”

FACT: It was “targeted” in the sense that several dozen of the 45 million people with federal student debt won’t profit from Biden’s trillion-dollar (probably illegal) loan forgiveness decree. The debt forgiveness will encourage more tuition hikes that will make a mockery of efforts to control “growing college costs.”

CLAIM: The Biden administration is working “to ensure that every American who wants to work can join the labor force . . . Increasing labor force participation can expand our economy’s potential and also help ease price pressures over time.”

FACT: Biden decreed the largest boost to food stamp benefits in history and gutted the work requirement for able-bodied adults without children. Food stamps sharply reduce work effort and recipients are far more likely to become obese than low-income individuals not receiving benefits.

CLAIM: The report boasts of “a decline of more than $1.20 in gas prices this summer” and stresses the administration’s efforts “to bring inflation down.”

FACT: Gasoline is far more expensive now than at the start of the Biden administration. Inflation remains at a 40-year high. Americans have seen a 10%+ reduction in the purchasing power of their paychecks and savings since Biden took office.

CLAIM: “The Biden-Harris Administration took decisive action to open America’s schools safely, making it easier for parents to work.”

FACT: Biden championed school closures during the 2020 election campaign, vilifying Donald Trump for keeping classrooms open. After he took office, Biden appointees, kowtowing to teacher union demands, encouraged long delays in re-opening. The resulting vast learning loss by students has greatly expanded the racial achievement gap among students.

CLAIM: “Delivering nearly $3,000 in savings to American families for a pair of hearing aids.”

FACT: Last month, the Food and Drug Administration finally approved the over-the-counter sale of hearing aids. But this is no Biden triumph. After five years of dallying and dithering, the FDA finally complied with the mandate in a law passed by Congress and signed by President Trump in 2017.

The FDA’s five-year delay in obeying the law and relieving consumers epitomizes the absurdity of Bidenomics. The Blueprint rhapsodizes about the miraculous benefits from a federal thumb in every pie. There is supposedly no private business or industry that cannot be improved by the intervention of bureaucratic commissars.

The White House boasts, “The Blueprint also aggressively crowds in private investment, particularly in areas where America must lead the future.” “Aggressively crowds in”? Regrettably, the White House failed to provide a translation for that preceding line. “No cliché left behind” was the motto for this report: “The Biden-Harris Administration is using every tool in its toolbox . . .”

Biden believes that deluging scores of failed federal programs such as Amtrak with billions of new financing will revolutionize public service — except for copy editing.

The report declares, “These dynamics necessited [sic] a fundamental reimagining of the federal government’s role in promoting the economy’s productive capacity and resilience . . .” Elsewhere, the report refers to the commander-in-chief as if he is a deity or a battleship: “The President Biden’s leadership on electric vehicles . . .”

Regardless of its glitches and mystifying passages, the Biden Blueprint proclaims: “This new architecture must replace the old regime.” But Team Biden actually champions the “old regime” by which Americans’ freedom and prosperity are sacrificed to allow politicians and their cronies to live like royalty.