INFLATION'S SOARING & THAT'S A SHAME, BUT BUNGLING BIDEN IS TO BLAME
News from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that February's all-item Consumer Price Index (CPI) skyrocketed 7.9 percent on a year-over-year basis came as no surprise to angry American consumers.
It was the largest increase since 1982 and followed increases exceeding 6 percent each month since September.
Anyone who does the family shopping, who keeps the family car or a sixteen-wheel hauling truck full of gas or diesel has been seeing this coming for almost a year.
And electricity prices are soaring, so no, "buying a government-subsidized EV" isn't the silver bullet that low-information shills say that it is.
Feigning concern about soaring gasoline prices, bungling Biden calumniously called it "Putin's price hike."
While shifting the blame for inflation to a foreign despot may be attractive politically, the BLS report tells us that the price surge had nothing to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, too late to have much impact on the month-long survey of daily gasoline prices.
The BLS report showed the food index was up 7.9 percent for the year and, yes, gasoline was up 37.9 percent.
It may be worth remembering that the U.S. average price of a gallon of gas in January 2021 was $2.38; by January 2022, the price was about a dollar higher at $3.32.
By March 10, the price was another dollar higher at $4.31.
Guess why.
Yes, Putin's invasion and bungling Biden's toothless sanctions are making a difference now.
But not last month, or last year.
Demand for gasoline surged much earlier when consumers, with money in the bank and uninterested in flying because of DEMOCRAT-induced plandemic panic, put family cars on the road in the midst of the disastrous DEMOCRAT-decreed shutdown, making the number of miles traveled in spring and summer 2021 rise to new heights.
For too long now, bungling Biden's hapless handlers have been unwilling to accept the notion that their policies are the major source of inflation, that the inflation they embedded in our economy is not transitory, that inflation is not just associated with "sudden" supply chain problems caused by someone else, and that inflation is not caused by business leaders suddenly becoming unusually greedy.
Inflation was created in Washington by DEMOCRATS, it's here to stay as long as DEMOCRATS are in charge and it's likely to worsen over the next 12 months unless we get DEMOCRATS out of DC.
Many analysts (and even bungling Biden's Council of Economic Advisers) now recognize that, fed by trillions of stimulus dollars promised to voters in exchange for flipping the Senate blue in Georgia, surging consumer demand placed extraordinary pressures on the already-strained supply of home appliances, automobiles, residential structures, gasoline, paint, and even cat food.
With borrowed federal money flooding their bank accounts, consumers spent it, so prices had to sail higher.
Obviously, this is not to say that war-generated market turmoil does not matter.
Anything that even threatens the supply of important commodities will generate higher prices.
And while what makes gasoline or anything else more expensive matters very little to consumers who have little choice but to pay the price, those who worry about government policy and what might be done to redress the situation know there is a difference between changes in the relative price of one commodity (say, gasoline) and changes in the overall price level for all commodities taken together, as seen in the CPI.
Easing energy supply constraints and thus making gasoline cheaper will involve encouraging more drilling and more fracking, in addition to rethinking and revising regional formulation differences required by the Environmental Protection Agency that make gasoline more costly. We should remove anti-competition policies like the Jones Act, which bans foreign-built or foreign-owned vessels from U.S. coastal shipping, making it more costly to move petroleum products domestically.
But bungling Biden's green goons won'T do that - will they?
https://reason.com/2022/03/11/blame-washington-not-moscow-for-surging-inflation
