GOP CONTINUES SPREADING UNTRUE STATEMENTS ABOUT THE NATION’S PRICE INFLATION

 

          …Republican Florida Senator, Rick Scott loves going after the Democrats

 

The nation’s inflation issues have nothing to do specifically with the Democratic President

 

Most inflation predictions that top inflation forecasts made in the spring turned out to be much too low.  Elite academic economists, when surveyed about the risks of prolonged inflation, they did however acknowledge a lot of uncertainty.

Corporate greed and the cancellation of an oil pipeline that didn’t yet exist, plus a secret plot to cancel Halloween, this was what we were dealing with the GOP.

Every time I think the inflation issues couldn’t any get dumber, I’m continually proven wrong.

To be fair, the forces behind inflation, like many economic problems, are highly complicated.  Economists can’t fully explain what determines current pricing behavior and inflation expectations in the real world.  Much less their ability to precisely predict where prices will land in just a few months.  Obviously, all the new waves and changes in the pandemic weren’t helping.

All of this means there’s a lot of room for reasonable errors on this issue, even among the experts.  But lately partisan factions have given us new, unreasonable sources of error as well.  Some of this noise has been impressively creative; it’s basically like having, “ massive inflation fiction.”

The left wing, for instance, has been rabble-rousing about how “corporate greed” is responsible for high inflation.  That of course, implies that corporations have only just remembered they’re supposed to be greedy. This is, of course, after having been very unselfish for several decades, and especially last year. ( Remember. inflation was super-low by historical standards in late 2019 and early 2020.)

The right wing, meanwhile, has been spinning its own increasingly ludicrous tall tales about inflation. That’s because Republicans see high inflation as being valuable political issues heading into the midterm elections.

“This is a gold mine for us,” as Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) recently put it .

As Scott, and most politicians know, U.S. presidents have very limited power to affect U.S. prices, especially prices set by those global markets (as is the case for oil or off-shore manufacturing).  But voters don’t really understand this, and many are eager to blame any president whenever they’re unhappy about the rising costs for gas or groceries. The GOP has decided it should take advantage of this fact.  Republican strategists are working overtime to exploit voters’ economic ignorance by proposing ways that Democrats might have had helped increase all prices.

Republicans and right-wing media,(such as Fox News) have argued, that President Biden has driven up energy prices as part of his supposed war on fossil fuels, specifically having anything to do with oil prices.  But they also blame him for shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline as a cause for price increases.  However, they don’t mention that this pipeline was only 8% built when Biden revoked a U.S. permit for its construction.  So, Biden did not actually shut down any existing oil supply. (It’s also not clear that the canceled XL pipeline would have much effect on U.S. gas prices, even if it were eventually built someday, given that most oil passing through it would be exported out of the U.S..)

Republicans also say the real way Biden raised gas prices was by ending drilling for oil and gas on public lands.

But this didn’t actually happen, even if Biden’s campaign pledges and executive actions had suggested it would. The Associated Press (AP) reported in July that the Biden administration was on track to approve more oil and gas drilling permits this year than were approved any year of the Trump administration.  In fact, actually more than any year since 2008.

Last month, just a few days after the global climate conference known as COP26, the Biden administration conducted the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history.

Other GOP talking points about “Bidenflation” have gotten increasingly wacky.

Recently Lara Trump told Fox News viewers that inflation is part of a Democratic plot to force families to give up beloved American traditions and holidays, including Thanksgiving and Halloween. (The “War on Christmas” apparently, now has major spinoffs.)

Actually, there is a more plausible argument Republicans could be making to attack Biden on inflation.

The main reason price growth is up has to do with our constrained supply, not keeping up with booming demand. That is, the pandemic has resulted in worker shortages, supply-chain disruptions and other bottlenecks in the United States and abroad. These problems are happening at the exact same time that cooped-up consumers are eager to buy even more stuff than they did pre-pandemic.

Recent U.S. fiscal policy may have exacerbated this dynamic issue as Biden and the Democrats enacted stimulus payments and other government transfers earlier this year.  This gave consumers more cash to spend.  Now consumers are spending that cash.  That could be one reason inflation is higher here than it is in, say, the euro zone.  Although, inflation has reached record highs there as well.

Aside from some vague noise about Democrats’ “big spending” habits, those checks are not really what Republican politicians are criticizing about President Biden.  And perhaps, that’s with good reason, as the Spring stimulus checks were extremely popular, especially among Republican voters.  Plus, this line of attack might also implicate former president Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers, since they too passed multiple rounds of stimulus payments last year.

So the GOP is peddling “war on Halloween and Christmas” instead.

As usual, it’s all very disgusting and mostly untrue.

Copyright G. Ater 2021