(Dobbs) If You Blame Biden for U.S. Inflation, How Do You Explain the Rest Of The World?
A pandemic, then a war, is how you explain it.
Social issues, campaign issues, divide our nation.
Lots of us are for abortion rights, lots of us are against (although more are for).
Lots of us are for gun reform, lots of us are against (although more are for).
Lots of us are for safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, lots of us are against (although more are for).
But inflation? No one is for inflation. You can be old or young, black or white, rich or poor, educated or illiterate, healthy or ill. No matter what class you’re in, inflation means you’re spending more than you used to for food and gas, heating and travel, clothing and furniture, cars and trucks.
And it’s not just our problem (although propaganda from political opportunists would have you believe we are the world’s worst case and that the Biden Administration is to blame). For the fiscal year just ended, the rate of inflation for the U.S. was 8.2%. That hurts, but they’re hurting worse in Europe. In Britain, the inflation rate last month was 10.1%— that’s more than 20% higher than ours. In Germany, it’s 10.9%. Across the European Union— between the cost of food jumping by 16% and the cost of energy by an agonizing 40%— the overall rate of inflation is 11%.
By those measures, we’ve got it good.
The New York Times’s Ashley Wu put together an uncomplicated visual last week, a chart comparing U.S. inflation with most of our allies’.
The Times also ran a story that serves as a microcosm of the global scope of the problem. A company called Moulins Bourgeois mills flour in France for about a thousand boulangeries (a.k.a bakeries). In a year, what it pays for wheat has shot up 30%. Its annual electricity bill has mushroomed from $48,000 to $195,000. With higher fuel prices, its delivery costs have skyrocketed. Even the paper to make the sacks in which the flour is shipped is more expensive than it’s ever been. The bottom line? The frenchman’s beloved baguette costs more today than it did a year ago.
It’s even worse from Berlin to Budapest.
Besides death and taxes, inflation is about the only thing we all share in common. Although oil companies report record earnings (which helps identify part of the problem), and airlines are reporting some of their highest-ever revenue per seat per mile (which helps identify another part), even those who profit from inflation see their spending eroded by it.
Yet as an election issue, it divides us right now every bit as much as abortion, guns, and the safety net. Not because some of us are for inflation and some are against, but because some are objective about its causes and some aren’t.
So what are those causes? Begin with the pandemic. It turned world economies, including ours, upside down.
Citizens stopped working, people stopped spending, businesses shut down, commerce was hammered. There was price-gouging, there were supply chain stoppages, which translates to people chasing fewer available goods, and paying more when they get them. Some of that has become the new normal. The world still hasn’t recovered.
Then look at the war in Ukraine, which has inflated the cost of living in several more ways. President Putin is punishing his enemies by creating shortages of energy in many parts of the world, especially Europe, and that pushes prices up. Ukraine itself was the world’s fourth biggest exporter of wheat but because of the war— the disruption to shipping, the destruction of processing facilities and the wheat fields themselves— wheat exports have dropped more than 40% from a year ago.
That helps explain the higher price of that Frenchman’s baguette. And it helps explain why we’re paying more for what we buy in the United States.
President Biden has taken measures to ease our pain, from engineering lower healthcare costs to releasing 180 million barrels of oil from the nation’s strategic reserves, which puts more gasoline in the system and keeps gas costs from rising higher.
Yet only about a third of Americans approve of how the president has dealt with inflation. So the question is, if Biden is to blame for the painful cost of living in the U.S. right now, how do you explain even more painful inflation virtually everywhere else in the world? True, he pushed pandemic relief programs that triggered inflation here, but they also triggered survival for tens of millions of Americans who suddenly saw either a drop in or a total loss of income. For me, the tradeoff was worth it and now, by and large, those programs have ended.
So although obviously it’s more complicated than this, here’s a simple answer: Biden inherited the pandemic, which roiled the economy, and now has to endure a war, which has roiled it more. What we’ve heard from the president is, from employment to production to tax revenues, we have a stronger economy every day, and a lower federal deficit, and that all bodes well for the future. You be the judge.
But that means you also have to be the judge of the party trying to bring him down, and must ask the question: what solutions have we heard from the Republicans? They’ve offered plenty of denunciation against the party in power and have vowed to make the defeat of Democrats their highest priority, but have they offered any plan of their own to bring inflation under control? The answer to that question is even simpler: nothing.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Thank you, Greg, for your always clear headed and accurate analysis!
I have been asking this question for ages. Why do the reporters not ask about world inflation at press conferences and interviews with Congressmen? Those who are only casually concerned with politics may have their eyes opened if that one question is front and center. The whole world is reeling from inflation and it has not been covered well at all by the press. President Biden does not bear the responsibility for the economic condition of all countries.