Inflation’s Back: Blame Joe

Inflation accelerated in July: The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, rose 3.3% over one year earlier, up from June’s 3%. That’s still below the peak of 7% last summer — but heading back up in the wrong direction. Some claim that’s just a fluke. In fact, it’s most likely thanks to President Joe Biden’s new spending spree — care of the woefully misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” kicking in — and means a whole new round of rising prices.

That law, as we noted at the time, actually increased federal spending, and the deficit, in the near-term.

It’s now widely acknowledged that the ginormous spending in Biden’s first big Democrats-only law, the “American Recovery Act” (also ill-named), triggered the inflationary spiral that began in early 2021. So no surprise that another spending spree is again pushing inflation up.

More: Since the IRA passed, we’ve learned that its supposed $271 billion in green subsidies (over a decade) actually will add up to three or four times as much, with Goldman Sachs estimating it over $1 trillion. (Not to mention the fact that financial institutions get three times as much from the subsidies as any other sector.)

All this, when average Americans are still slammed by Biden’s first inflation wave.

And when he’s working on a new $400-billion-plus student-loan giveaway that will further goose inflation.

As of July, 61% of US adults said they were living paycheck-to-paycheck, up from 59% last year, per a new report from LendingClub. That includes 78% of those earning under $50,000 a year and 65% of those earning $50,000 to $100,000.

Credit-card, car-loan and consumer-loan delinquencies are all at their highest levels since the Great Recession of 2008-’09 — and top credit-card companies plan major hikes in fees. And mortgage rates are the highest since 2001.

Some of that, of course, is the result of the Federal Reserve’s rapid interest-rate hikes. But the Fed’s moves have been necessary medicine — the only real anti-inflation move out of Washington, even as Biden and his party have kept on goosing spending.

Yet, laughably, the president’s been taking credit for the Fed’s success as part of his “Bidenomics is working” tour, with his media echo chamber singing in chorus.

Never mind that prices are up 16.9% since he took office and real wages down about 3%. Nor that gas prices are headed back up, and nearly three Americans in four say their financial situation is worsening.

And now comes a sign that inflation isn’t even under control; Joe’s claims to have beaten it are as hollow as his months-long insistence back in 2021 that it was merely “transitory.”

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about — and when he does, it’s a lie.