Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act celebration a PR disaster
If you want a window into the utter incompetence of the Biden administration, look no further than Tuesday’s celebration of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Some genius at the White House decided it would be a brilliant idea to gather thousands of supporters for a big party on the South Lawn to celebrate the law on the exact day new inflation figures came out. Just hours before the event, we learned that inflation hit 8.3 percent in August — prompting the Dow Jones industrial average to nosedive more than 1,200 points, the market’s biggest one-day collapse in more than two years.
Americans learned that inflation rose for food to 11.4 percent since last year, the largest increase since 1979. Year over year, the price of chicken went up 16.57 percent, baby food up 12.58 percent, milk up 16.96 percent, bread up 16.23 percent, and fresh fruits and vegetables up 7.93 percent. The cost of shelter rose 6.2 percent, the most since 1984. And energy prices remained stubbornly high, with gasoline up 25.64 percent from the year before and the cost of fuel oil rising 68.77 percent just as many Americans prepare to buy it to heat their homes this winter.
What a great time to have an “inflation reduction” celebration at the White House — and to invite James Taylor to come and perform a song partially about suicide. “This is your victory!” the president told the crowd, adding, “And you deserve a huge round of applause!” For the 78 percent of Americans who say they have faced hardships because of inflation, it all must have seemed bizarre and out of touch.
Even if the disastrous consumer price numbers had not come out the same day, it would have been farcical to celebrate the Inflation Reduction Act in the wake of Biden’s announcement on student-loan forgiveness. We already knew that the Inflation Reduction Act would not actually reduce inflation. The nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates the law’s impact on inflation to be “not statistically different from zero,” while the Congressional Budget Office and Moody’s Analytics also found the law would have marginal to no effect on inflation this decade.
The only reason the Inflation Reduction Act’s impact on inflation was neutral is because the massive climate spending in the law is offset by even larger tax increases, which purportedly reduced the federal budget deficit by $275 billion. But right after signing it into law, Biden announced his student-loan forgiveness plan, which the Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates will cost between $605 billion and $1 trillion. None of that is paid for. It’s all deficit spending. So right after claiming credit for reducing the deficit by $275 billion, Biden announced a plan to spend more than two or three times that amount — nullifying all the deficit reduction in the bill he had just signed — and then some.
According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Biden’s debt cancellation will “wipe out the disinflationary benefits of the IRA” and “boost near-term inflation far more than the IRA will lower it.” If you eliminate the deficit reduction in the Inflation Reduction Act, then all you’re left with is the climate spending — which means Biden’s policies will make inflation worse.
The hypocrisy does not end there. After celebrating a bill that spends $369 billion on climate and clean energy, Biden left his White House party for Joint Base Andrews, then making a half-hour flight on Air Force One to vote in the Delaware primary — rather than casting an absentee ballot or voting early on any of his dozens of visits to his home state.
In recent weeks, climate activists have been roasting Kylie Jenner and other celebrities as “climate criminals” for flying on their private jets on short flights. Yet Biden took two military flights aboard a Boeing VC-25 to vote. Why didn’t he just vote on Saturday, when he was home in Wilmington? Biden has spent the past year championing mail-in and absentee voting, even accusing Republicans of standing with racists, traitors and segregationists for opposing his proposed federal takeover of our elections. Yet when it came time to vote, rather than licking a stamp (whose price rose 3.4 percent on his watch) he cast his ballot in person at great cost to taxpayers — unnecessarily emitting vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just hours after boasting on the South Lawn how he was taking “the most aggressive action ever, ever, ever to confront the climate crisis.”
The whole day was a farce. If the Biden White House can’t manage to get the president an absentee ballot — or see that holding a party to celebrate his inflation reduction “victory” on the day disastrous inflation numbers are released would be a PR disaster — then it’s little wonder it is incapable of solving the serial disasters, from Afghanistan to the border to runaway inflation, it has unleashed on the American people.