Biden wants you to believe shortages are a big ‘success’

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 is 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 30% more on average for your home heating bills this winter.

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 seeing. 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 sit 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 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 — 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. 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.

And 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.

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