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| The Cynic |
The “beef with Biden,” the Cynic says, is that he campaigned for President as a Democrat moderate and has governed ever since as a half-crazed, addled progressive.
If you are indifferent to politics, as many voters in the
U.S. are, you will be hugging your resentments as you march to the polls in
November, because the entirely predictable consequences of the postmodern itch
to make the world over has now settled itself in our easy chairs, and most
professional politicians, notably here in deep blue Connecticut, have succumbed
to “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over.”
That effort in recent days has been costly. The prices of
goods and services have increased dramatically during the first year of
President Joe Biden’s administration. Even well-wishers are beginning to talk
darkly of a malingering recession. Recessions occur when there are too many
dollars chasing too few goods. Excessive public debt, business closures by
governors wielding extraordinary, extra-constitutional power over a weakening
economy in response to a decreasing Coronavirus pandemic, increases in the
price of labor, and widespread unemployment are all handmaidens of recessions.
“Consumer
prices rise more than expected as energy costs surge,” CNBC told us at the beginning of October,
2021. In a year over year comparison, price increases have reached a level just
below a 30-year high. Whether or not the rapid increase in inflation is
transitory is a matter now under discussion in boardrooms where experts decide
precisely how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Only the most
optimistic of the experts assert that the “transitory” recession will disappear
before Election Day, 2022.
As prices have reached an inflationary level not seen in the
United States for 30 years, Biden’s disapproval rating, now scraping the bottom of
the barrel at 51.4 has dropped accordingly. Some Democrats, mostly malingering
moderates, have been unnerved by this political dance of death.
And never mind that Biden will not appear on the ticket
until 2024. Resentment is impatient.
Biden recently told all the interested parties – Democrat
holdovers from the Age of Camelot, millionaire donors to Democrat campaigns,
and the “Tea and Toast Media” -- “My plan is to run for reelection” in 2024.” Per
usual, he left open a window of doubt, a dangling “but,” according to ABC News: “… but the 78-year-old Democrat is leaving open
the possibility of stepping aside after one term.” Then too, some aged
politicians have been known to die at their desks while energetically “moving
the country forward,” as if time itself had closed shop and could not, unaided,
move itself forward.
Many voters, impatient with the usual campaign ambiguities,
have already concluded that progressives are responsible for the current crisis
of confidence, signs of which are everywhere, most notably in Biden’s bottom of
the barrel approval ratings. Unaffiliated voters already have taken Biden’s measure
and found him wanting.
Semiconscious revolutionists, such as the members of The
Squad and their political enablers – Democrat Speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Democrat leader in the U.S. Senate Chuck
Schumer, none of whom appear able to grasp the logical and necessary
consequences of their absurd economic policies – may be worse than lucid
revolutionists.
“The first thing to notice about the ‘spike in inflation
stories,’” the Cynic says, “is that they are not ‘yellow journalism’ of the
kind one expected of major news outlets when President Donald Trump was deservedly,
most Times and Associated Press reporters might agree, being flayed during his
entire, mercifully short, four years in office.
“The usual report on the Biden inflation is pallid, even
though inflation wrecks both the value of money and a struggling post-Coronavirus
economy.
What does he mean, I ask, by “the Biden inflation?”
The Cynic takes a deep breath. The national and state
economies, he says, were robust under Trump, much less so under Biden. According
to reliable Labor Department figures, over-all prices are up 6.2% Beef prices
are up 20.1%, gas prices double that at 49.6%. The price of labor, salaries,
are up slightly, but inflation, up more than 5%, wipes out the gain, reducing
after inflation real wages, which means households have less disposable income to balance household
budgets.
And the post-Trumpian exhausted economy cannot be attributed
solely to Coronavirus.
State and national Democrats raised the cost of labor, at a
time when the Coronavirus economy was panting, by raising taxes and sheltering
workers behind protective programs that kept the unemployed from reentering the
private market place. Taxes and needless regulations, we know, decimate the
production of goods and services. Whatever you tax tends to disappear.
This is the operative principle of ardent progressives and
socialists, as well as conservatives and libertarians. Progressives want a
confiscatory tax on the wealth of millionaires because 1) they wish to
redistribute productive wealth to the deserving poor, and 2) to put the matter
bluntly, they want millionaires, a blight on the nation, to disappear.
They want fossil fuel to disappear. Therefore, drive up the
cost of fossil fuel by reducing its supply -- even that source of energy that
is relatively clean, natural gas -- and use the redistributive engines of
government to transfer sequestered tax dollars to solar, wind and battery
powered vehicles. That is the Biden-Sanders program in a nutshell. Of course,
the nutshell is clothed in such verbiage as will convince the real financiers
of the Biden revolution, the overtaxed middle class in the United States, to
gratefully and smilingly bow to the guillotine.
Every day, minute by minute, more and more, Vermont Senator
Bernie Sanders begins to take on the appearance of a suppressed Marat, one of
the most fervent of the French Revolutionaries.
“They question my right to the title of philanthropist,”
Marat said as heads rolled. “Ah, what injustice! Who cannot see that I want to
cut off a few heads to save a great number! ... Brand them with hot irons, cut
off their thumbs, tear out their tongues!”
Albert Camus noted in The Rebel, “But Marat, making his
final calculations, claimed two hundred and seventy-three thousand heads.”
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