BIDEN WANTS YOU TO BELIEVE SHORTAGES AND INFLATION ARE ‘EXTRAORDINARY SUCCESS’

WASHINGTON — Remember when President Joe Biden declared his Afghanistan withdrawal an “extraordinary success”? Well, now the Biden administration is trying to convince Americans that the supply chain crisis and inflation we are experiencing are an extraordinary success as well.

“Demand is off the charts,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg declared this weekend. “And if you think about those images of ships … waiting at anchor on the West Coast … every one of those ships is full of record amounts of goods that Americans are buying, because demand is up, because income is up, because the president has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession.”

Got that? You should be grateful to the president when store shelves are bare. You should be grateful to be paying $1 a gallon more at the pump, and 30% more on average for your home heating bills this winter (with some households’ bills spiking nearly 50%). And your kids should definitely be grateful on Christmas morning when they don’t get the G.I. Joe with the Kung Fu grip because it’s still sitting on a cargo ship parked off the California coast. It’s all a sign that the Biden administration’s brilliant economic policies are working.

In fact, the opposite is true. The Biden administration’s policies are exacerbating the inflation and extreme labor shortages we are experiencing. There are 10.4 million unfilled jobs in the United States, and the number of unemployed workers for every open job is also at a record low.

Why are we experiencing such a massive worker shortage? Simple. Workers can afford to be on the sidelines. That’s because during the pandemic the federal government handed out trillions of dollars to help people get through the lockdowns. But when the lockdowns ended, the government spending didn’t. Biden’s first act as president was to pass an additional $1.9 trillion pandemic relief — sending millions of Americans stimulus checks, the largest child tax credit payments ever and extending absurdly generous unemployment supplements that paid most Americans more to stay home than to work.

With all that free money from Washington, personal savings rates soared. The Wall Street Journal reports that in August American households were sitting on $1.7 trillion in savings. That means millions of Americans are flush with cash to spend, but also less eager to return to work. Some are not returning at all, as retirements have more than doubled from pre-pandemic rates. As a result, the demand side of the economy is overheating, while the supply side can’t keep up because of a lack of workers — which means shortages and higher prices.

Knowing this, the smart move would be to stop shoveling government money into the economy and let the supply side catch up to demand. Instead, the Biden administration is trying to pass a multitrillion dollar social spending bill that will further fuel demand and discourage people from working. “Right now, we need less demand and more supply,” says Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “And what the Democrats want to do is have more demand and less supply.”

Worse still, in the midst of a historic labor shortage, the Biden administration is pushing vaccine mandates that force many employers to fire unvaccinated Americans who are willing to work — even if they have natural immunity from previous infection. This will push more Americans out of the labor force, at a time when employers can’t find workers to replace them.

Biden’s war on fossil fuels is also exacerbating the supply chain crisis. Not only is the transportation industry facing a shortage of long-haul truckers, the cost of transportation is skyrocketing. Crude oil prices have doubled since Biden’s election to $84 per barrel, and are expected to continue rising through the end of the year. When you announce your intention to tax and regulate the fossil fuel industry out of existence, the result is supply shortages, higher prices and transportation delays.

And finally there is Biden’s infrastructure fiasco. Buttigieg says that “the supply chain disruptions we’re experiencing reflect demand roaring back far faster than decades-old infrastructure can handle.” If that is the case, then why did Biden encourage progressives in the House to take his $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill hostage until there is a deal on a separate multitrillion dollar reconciliation bill? The president is delaying infrastructure investments to pass policies that will make the labor shortage worse.

If this is what “extraordinary success” looks like, I’d hate to see failure.