jimnyc
03-16-2022, 12:40 PM
Oh brother. :rolleyes:
But I should have known better than to even click on a Slate article to see the comparisons. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
---
Biden's Dishonest Attempt To Pin Inflation on Putin
Ten months ago, Jeremy Siegel issued a dire warning about the trajectory of prices.
"The money supply since the beginning of the pandemic, so a little over a year, has gone up almost 30 percent. Now, that money is not going to disappear. That money is going to find its way into spending and into higher prices," Siegel, a professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told CNBC during an interview on May 14. "Over the next two, three years we could easily have 20 percent inflation with this increase in the money supply."
He was hardly the only one sounding the alarm. A few months earlier, before Congress approved President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, several prominent economists had warned that the stimulus bill—the third major one passed since the outbreak of COVID-19 just a year earlier—was too big and threatened to overheat the economy.
Among the critics were people like Lawrence Summers, who served as Treasury Secretary during the Obama administration. "There is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation," Summers warned in a Washington Post op-ed in February 2021. "Administration officials' dismissal of even the possibility of inflation, and the difficulties in mobilizing congressional support for tax increases or spending cuts, there is the risk of inflation expectations rising sharply."
"I think we do not need to spend $1.9 trillion…and we should have a smaller program," Olivier Blanchard, the former chairman of the International Monetary Fund, wrote on Twitter in response to Summers' op-ed. Biden's plan to shovel another $1.9 trillion into the economy was coming on top of unprecedented fiscal stimulus and high personal savings rates (due to the pandemic). Americans were already poised to spend a lot more money chasing the same amount of goods as the pandemic waned, and the increase in demand would require impossible levels of output to match. "Strong inflation" would be the natural result, he warned.
"This would not be overheating," he wrote. "It would be starting a fire."
By July, a few months after the American Rescue Plan passed, economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal said Americans should be bracing for levels of inflation not seen in more than 20 years. That dire prediction was an underestimation.
Rest - https://reason.com/2022/03/15/bidens-dishonest-attempt-to-pin-inflation-on-putin/
Joe Biden Didn’t Do This
Republicans say the White House is responsible for high gas prices. That’s ridiculous.
As gas prices have surged over the past several months—and shot up even further following Russia’s incursion into Ukraine—Republicans have predictably tried to pin blame on the White House.
“Joe Biden caused this and doesn’t seem to care,” the Republican National Committee’s deputy communications director tweeted last week, echoing the stickers that Trump-voting motorists have been slapping onto gas pumps across the country.
But President Joe Biden did not cause this. In fact, other than sanctions against Russia—which the GOP broadly supported—the primary reasons why filling up your tank has gotten more expensive over the past year have almost nothing to do with America’s chief executive. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since presidents almost never have much direct control over gas prices. But unfortunately voters act like they do, which is sort of the sad cosmic joke of American politics.
But I digress. Let’s debunk the argument, shall we?
Why Absolutely Nothing Republicans Are Saying About Gas Prices Makes Sense
Members of the GOP have been saying that a big reason the cost of gas soared over the past few months is that the president simply hasn’t let oil companies drill enough.
Specifically, they say, the White House has bottled up American fossil fuel production by issuing fewer oil leases on federal lands and by stopping pipeline construction.
For example: Republicans on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee complained in a letter this month “there has not been one lease sale on federal lands since you imposed a ban in violation of federal law.” (They implored Biden to “take the shackles off American energy.”) And the House Republicans’ campaign chief blamed the gas price spike on the administration shutting down “drilling on federal lands,” “freezing all the permits” offered to oil drillers, and “killing the Keystone XL pipeline.”
It is true that U.S. oil production is lower now than it was in in February of 2020, when it hit an all-time record high of 12.8 million barrels. (That was before the market crashed at the onset of the coronavirus crisis.) But based on the GOP’s rhetoric, you might be tempted to think that U.S. oil production had collapsed since Biden stepped into the Oval Office.
Rest - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/dont-blame-biden-for-gas-prices.html
But I should have known better than to even click on a Slate article to see the comparisons. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
---
Biden's Dishonest Attempt To Pin Inflation on Putin
Ten months ago, Jeremy Siegel issued a dire warning about the trajectory of prices.
"The money supply since the beginning of the pandemic, so a little over a year, has gone up almost 30 percent. Now, that money is not going to disappear. That money is going to find its way into spending and into higher prices," Siegel, a professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told CNBC during an interview on May 14. "Over the next two, three years we could easily have 20 percent inflation with this increase in the money supply."
He was hardly the only one sounding the alarm. A few months earlier, before Congress approved President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, several prominent economists had warned that the stimulus bill—the third major one passed since the outbreak of COVID-19 just a year earlier—was too big and threatened to overheat the economy.
Among the critics were people like Lawrence Summers, who served as Treasury Secretary during the Obama administration. "There is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation," Summers warned in a Washington Post op-ed in February 2021. "Administration officials' dismissal of even the possibility of inflation, and the difficulties in mobilizing congressional support for tax increases or spending cuts, there is the risk of inflation expectations rising sharply."
"I think we do not need to spend $1.9 trillion…and we should have a smaller program," Olivier Blanchard, the former chairman of the International Monetary Fund, wrote on Twitter in response to Summers' op-ed. Biden's plan to shovel another $1.9 trillion into the economy was coming on top of unprecedented fiscal stimulus and high personal savings rates (due to the pandemic). Americans were already poised to spend a lot more money chasing the same amount of goods as the pandemic waned, and the increase in demand would require impossible levels of output to match. "Strong inflation" would be the natural result, he warned.
"This would not be overheating," he wrote. "It would be starting a fire."
By July, a few months after the American Rescue Plan passed, economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal said Americans should be bracing for levels of inflation not seen in more than 20 years. That dire prediction was an underestimation.
Rest - https://reason.com/2022/03/15/bidens-dishonest-attempt-to-pin-inflation-on-putin/
Joe Biden Didn’t Do This
Republicans say the White House is responsible for high gas prices. That’s ridiculous.
As gas prices have surged over the past several months—and shot up even further following Russia’s incursion into Ukraine—Republicans have predictably tried to pin blame on the White House.
“Joe Biden caused this and doesn’t seem to care,” the Republican National Committee’s deputy communications director tweeted last week, echoing the stickers that Trump-voting motorists have been slapping onto gas pumps across the country.
But President Joe Biden did not cause this. In fact, other than sanctions against Russia—which the GOP broadly supported—the primary reasons why filling up your tank has gotten more expensive over the past year have almost nothing to do with America’s chief executive. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since presidents almost never have much direct control over gas prices. But unfortunately voters act like they do, which is sort of the sad cosmic joke of American politics.
But I digress. Let’s debunk the argument, shall we?
Why Absolutely Nothing Republicans Are Saying About Gas Prices Makes Sense
Members of the GOP have been saying that a big reason the cost of gas soared over the past few months is that the president simply hasn’t let oil companies drill enough.
Specifically, they say, the White House has bottled up American fossil fuel production by issuing fewer oil leases on federal lands and by stopping pipeline construction.
For example: Republicans on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee complained in a letter this month “there has not been one lease sale on federal lands since you imposed a ban in violation of federal law.” (They implored Biden to “take the shackles off American energy.”) And the House Republicans’ campaign chief blamed the gas price spike on the administration shutting down “drilling on federal lands,” “freezing all the permits” offered to oil drillers, and “killing the Keystone XL pipeline.”
It is true that U.S. oil production is lower now than it was in in February of 2020, when it hit an all-time record high of 12.8 million barrels. (That was before the market crashed at the onset of the coronavirus crisis.) But based on the GOP’s rhetoric, you might be tempted to think that U.S. oil production had collapsed since Biden stepped into the Oval Office.
Rest - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/dont-blame-biden-for-gas-prices.html