Tucker: Inflation has been a disaster for virtually everyone
Fox News host voices his concerns over record-high inflation on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Usually when there is a scandal or a crisis in this country, the people who are responsible for it respond to it by averting their gaze. They just ignore it on the principle that if you don't see something, it can't bother you.
"What opioid crisis?" That usually works. But if it doesn't work and people start to complain about what they've done, our leaders just move to the next stage and deny it's even happening. Racist curricula in your kid's school? Come on, there's no such thing. You're a conspiracy nut. Better call the DOJ.
Mandatory COVID vaccines that don't actually work as advertised? Please, you're just imagining it. You must be an anti-vaxxer. U.S.-funded bio labs in Ukraine? Shut up, traitor, that's pure Russian disinformation and so on. They do this with everything because it almost always works. You may be the injured party in whatever disaster they've managed to cook up, but by the time The Washington Post gets done explaining it, you're a criminal for noticing it happened. It's very effective.
Unfortunately for them, it doesn't work with inflation. Inflation is just too obvious to deny. Everybody knows when inflation hits, when the prices go up, because everybody goes shopping. So when you get inflation, you're stuck with it. Our leaders know this, obviously, so their first move when we got inflation was to reassure us there was nothing to worry about because actually inflation is a good thing. We've been longing for inflation, and thank God we finally got it. "American needs higher, longer-lasting inflation," declared Bloomberg News.
Well, when that didn't work, as it was never going to, because apart from big institutional debt holders, no one in the world actually wants inflation. When that failed, they tried a new tactic. "Yes, inflation is not ideal," they admitted. "but it's like fog in the morning. It's inconvenient, but it's temporary. It burns off and won't last long." The word they used to describe this was "transitory," and they used that word a lot. Watch.
SHOPPERS SAY INFLATION IS FORCING THEM TO CHANGE HABITS
White House press secretary Jen Psaki speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Wednesday, April 20, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Our economists have conveyed that they feel that the impact of our proposals will be transitory.
JENNIFER GRANHOLM, U.S. ENERGY SECRETARY: All of the economists that the president has been relying on suggest that there is a transitory nature to the inflation problem.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Economists call all these things transitory effects.
REP. MAXINE WATERS, D-CALIF.: This inflation that we are experiencing is transitory. It is not going to be here long.
JANET YELLEN, U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY: We've had several months of high inflation that most economists, including me, believe will be transitory.
JEROME POWELL, FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIR: We don't expect that those, that upward pressure will produce substantially higher prices or that the effects will be persistent. We expect that they'll be transitory or temporary.
INFLATION SOARS 8.3% IN APRIL, HOVERING NEAR 40-YEAR HIGH
It wasn't just Maxine Waters and Joe Biden and Joe Biden's flack, none of whom can do math, obviously. You just saw the head of the Federal Reserve and the former head of the Federal Reserve tell you this was going to be transitory. Transitory. That was the best they could do, but behind the reassuring happy talk they were, in fact, starting to panic because this was not at all what they had expected or predicted in public.
In fact, in September, 17 winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, an award that suggests the winner understands economics, signed a public letter urging Joe Biden to spend $2 trillion more because inflation was no longer a concern. There was no way we would get inflation and we're quoting, "The Build Back Better package," wrote these economists, "will transform the U.S. economy to be more efficient without presenting an inflationary threat."
So, trillions of new government spending, were going to make this country more efficient, but we would never get inflation? It was hard to see, even to not an economist, how that could be true. So, this spending, these trillions, were on top of trillions that Joe Biden had already spent, a bill that he'd already signed. That's many trillions. And it turns out when you spend that much, you get inflation.
INFLATION HURTS MIDDLE-CLASS AMERICANS THE MOST: SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS
The Fed has found that that first bill raised inflation by at least three points, because when you print more dollars, each dollar is worth less. You don't need to be an economist to understand that, but these economists wanted even more spending, and they assured us it would not cause inflation, but of course it did. It was always going to, and by March of this year, that was obvious to everyone so Bloomberg News, which told us inflation was good, now kind of got a little more honest. They wrote a piece offering tips on how to deal with inflation because now inflation was bad.
Bloomberg told its readers to eat lentils instead of meat and to kill their dogs because pets are expensive. As Bloomberg put it, "Nobody said this would be fun." And they were right about that. It hasn't been fun. In fact, inflation has been a disaster for virtually everyone except the big debt holders. Officially, according to numbers out today, the inflation rate is 8.3%, but that's a fake number. It's based on CPI, which is a rigged measure.
In every real-life scenario, the ones that you go through when you buy things to live, the numbers are much higher. For example, this year, the price of breakfast ceeal, which many people eat in the morning, has gone up by 10%. The cost of chicken nuggets is up 18%. Stick to lentils, Powell.
Canned fruit and vegetables are up more than 10%. Juice, snacks and clothing for your kids is up 9%. The price of baby food, if you can find it, is up 13%. Fertilizer prices – being the basis of all agricultural products – is up 61% over last year.
Corn, for example, was at $589 a bushel at the beginning of this year. It's now at $815 per bushel. That's a 38% increase, higher than the CPI. Want to visit your family? Want to take a vacation? Want to take a work trip? The average cost of an airline ticket is now up more than 33% for the year. Gas prices—and you know this well—are up 50%. The average price of a used van was in May of last year was about $23,000. It's now $34,000. That's a 47% increase in a real product that you might have to buy, a used van. It's not 8.3%, according to the CPI.
The average price of a used crossover SUV is up from $22,000 to $27,000—27% increase. Want to buy a house? Well, you're in trouble. Median home prices are up 16%. And the higher value zip codes are up a lot more than that, hundreds of percent in a lot of places. Here's the bad news for you. If you want to buy one, the 30-year mortgage rate is a 13-year high. So, this really is worst-case scenario. Interest rates get high so people can't afford to buy houses, but home values don't go down because all the houses are being snatched up by big investors, which are converting them to rental units so you will owe nothing and be happy.
These are very distressing trends and everybody feels them and that explains why a recent poll from Pew found that inflation is at the very top of Americans' list of concerns. Ukraine, which everyone in Washington is obsessed with (Mitch McConnell has told us it's the single most important issue in the world.) is not even in the top ten concerns of American citizens.
So, you look at a poll like that and many more like it, and you reach the obvious conclusion. You have no choice. If you live in Washington, you are responsible for inflation, you pretend that you care about inflation and you think it's bad. It's been pretty easy for Joe Biden to say this because you can blame food inflation, just like he blamed Donald Trump's election, on Vladimir Putin. So, that's what he's doing.
President Biden speaks during the 2022 National and State Teachers of the Year event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, April 27, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
BIDEN, APRIL 12: I'm doing everything within my power by executive orders to bring down the price and address the Putin price hike.
BIDEN, MAY 10: Let me start with the Putin price hike. High gas prices and energy prices.
BIDEN, APRIL 21: 70% of the increase in inflation was a consequence of Putin's price hike because of the impact on gas and energy prices. I'm doing everything I can to bring down the price to address Putin's price hike.
Not only did Vladimir Putin singlehandedly hack the DNC and embarrass the Democratic Party, which is the greatest felony one can commit, but he wrecked our economy. How did he do that from the other side of the world when he runs an economy totally detached from ours? Good question, but that's really all they have at this point and you can see, given that, why Democrats are encouraging war in Ukraine, why they want that war to last forever. If the war in Ukraine ever ended, who would they blame for the effects of their deranged policies? They'd have to pick a new person – probably you.
But in point of fact, Vladimir Putin, for all of his faults, did not cause inflation in the United States. The people who run our economy in the U.S. government caused inflation in the United States, and they did it the old-fashioned way by printing a ton of money very quickly and that devalued our currency as printing a ton of money very quickly always does. Now the way this is measures with something called M2, that's the data set that the Federal Reserve uses to measure money supply. Our M2 money supply is not just going up. Our money supply is going up faster than it ever has in American history. As of today, M2 stands at more than $22 trillion. For reference, on February 3, 2020, it was at 15.3 trillion. That is, if you don't have a calculator handy, a 43% jump in our nation's money supply in just over two years.
What's the result? The result is predictable and obvious. Inflation is going up much faster in the United States than is in, say, Europe, where they didn't spend as much on stimulus. Whatever Putin did or didn't do, none of this is his fault. This pre-dates Putin's invasion of Ukraine and you don't need to be a right winger to acknowledge that. Even CNN is acknowledging that.
DON LEMON: Biden called it the Putin price hike. I mean, is the pain at the pump all because of the war in Ukraine? Not really, right?
JOE MATHIEU, BLOOMBERG: They like to talk about the Putin price hike, but of course, energy prices were soaring even before the war began. Inflation was an issue before we ever started talking about Ukraine.
JASMINE WRIGHT, CNN: So, there we heard that White House line that it's due to President Putin's price hike. One thing that is still out there is whether or not this is working, especially when it comes to a recent CNN poll that showed that less than a third of Americans really feel that this party's economic vision aligns with their own. So, that is something, a crushing thing for this administration to deal with as it really prepares to take on the midterm elections.
KUDLOW: WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF AN EMERGENCY INFLATION CRISIS
Everyone understands what's going on here. Sorry, it's not Putin's fault. It's the fault of the people currently in charge and that makes Joe Biden very much like the classic arsonist firemen. He created the disaster he now claims he will fix. "Oh, I just happened to be here. I'll put it out."
Biden caused this and not just Biden, Janet Yellen, his whole economic team and by the way, the legacy economic team. This has been going on for a long time. It's not just Biden, but he has made it much worse and he's done it on purpose.
Biden is shutting down domestic energy production. The administration just canceled sales of federal oil leases. Why are they doing this? Why are they making it worse? Everything depends upon the price of energy. Everything you buy was trucked there or brought by ship or plane or rail. You need energy to bring you the products that you buy. And if the price of energy goes up, so does the price of those products. It's really simple. So, when you hike the price of energy, which they've done on purpose, you're increasing inflation, period. You don't need to be an economist to understand that, much less a Nobel Prize-winning economist.
Why are they doing this? Well, there are three reasons. First, they have to do it. America's sovereign debt levels are way, way too high. We basically nationalized the debt, which is, say, we transferred it to taxpayers from the, oh, wait, meltdown. So, we have way too much debt and the only way out of that is to devalue the U.S. dollar. Otherwise, the U.S. government won't be able to afford the interest payments on the money that it owes. No one says it out loud, but it's absolutely true.
We have to have inflation or else the U.S. government will default. You have to pay the price for their bad policies. Okay? So, the morons who mismanaged the American economy need inflation. Thank you, Janet Yellen. The rest of us could have seen this coming ten years ago, but somehow you didn't.
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The second reason is that rising energy prices justify their transition to the Green New Deal. Nobody in America would ever choose to transition to green energy, which is to say to put trillions of U.S. tax dollars into the pet investment projects of Democratic donors. No one would ever do that voluntarily. But they're hoping that the price of fossil fuels will go so high that you have no choice. "Oh, you can't afford to fill your truck. Guess you're going to need a Prius now, and we're definitely going to need to control the thermostat in your home."
Now, if that sounds too sinister to be real, it is real. Yes, it's sinister. It's also real and here's Joe Biden's commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, who ran the state of Rhode Island, of all places. Shouldn't that be disqualifying? Yes, it should. Somehow, she got a cabinet post. Here she is, still employed amazingly, telling you that climate change is existential and therefore more important than your picayune concerns, like putting clothes on your kids. Watch this.
REP BEN CLINE, R-VA.: While Americans are struggling and seeing their paychecks shrink, a 24% increase over our FY 21 levels for NOAA doesn't really help families put food on the table or clothes on the back at a time when inflation is at a 40-year high. Can you talk about how this massive allocation of funds helps to combat inflation or deal with supply chain issues that you say are so important?
GINA RAIMONDO: Yes. So, look, we believe climate change is an existential threat so, you know, children won't, forget about clothes on their back. They're not going to be able to have a life if we don't deal with climate change.
"Forget about clothes on your back (Meaning your children's back). Forget about your children. Climate change is existential. We can use it to justify anything, any power grab, any failure, any disaster that we caused and should have stopped before it got completely out of control and take the whole economy. Climate change! Climate change!"
SIEMENS LEAVING RUSSIA OVER UKRAINE INVASION
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the debt ceiling during an event in the State Dining Room of the White House, Monday, Oct. 4 in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Pressing the U.S. economy to the brink actually has uses for the Biden administration. They will use your economic suffering as a pretext for assuming control over every aspect of your life and that's the third reason they're doing this to our economy. As Samantha Power, who has no grounding whatsoever in even balancing a checkbook – she's a lady who became famous for writing a book that informed us that genocide is bad. Really?
Did you know that? Samantha Power discovered genocide is bad. "Oh, she cares more than you." As she put it just the other day, "never let a crisis go to waste." She actually said that out loud.
Now, Democrats in Congress recognize that this is an opportunity. It's an opportunity for them, not simply to get more power, but to make certain their preexisting obsessions become law and, of course, always to lecture you. Here's Congresswoman Katie Porter of California explaining that because inflation is so high, we need more abortion. Watch.
REP. KATIE PORTER, D-CALIF.: The fact that things like inflation can happen and it can become more expensive to feed your kids and to fuel your car is exactly why people need to be able to be in charge of how many mouths they're going to have to feed. So, I think the fact that we're seeing this jump in expenses, that we're seeing people having to pay more in the grocery store, pay more at the pump, pay more for housing, is a reason that people are saying, "I need to be able to make my own decisions about when and if to start a family."
SIEMENS LEAVING RUSSIA OVER UKRAINE INVASION
Now, she said that live on TV and the other side of the camera was a host called Larry O'Donnell over at MSNBC and she just said out loud. This member of Congress said, "Yeah, I mean, it's sad that you can't afford to have children in this country, but the upside is now you get to end their lives early so you shouldn't have to feed them. So really, there is kind of a silver lining in that cloud."
"We're upset about the economy," say the American people. Lady from California goes," Have an abortion." That's her answer? What country is this? What are you even talking about? That's insane and so dark.
But you can be certain this is the one thing you can count on, that the left will never propose a solution to problems, even problems they caused, that, in the end, disempowers the Democratic Party. Every solution makes them more powerful.
How long before Joe Biden decides he can set retail prices? Don't laugh it off. It's coming.
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