Inflation? What Inflation?

When the people in charge are this confused, you need to own gold!

Today’s subject matter comes from the people at Committee to Unleash Prosperity.  

“We’re still scratching our heads,” they confess, “trying to figure out what the White House strategy is for bringing down inflation which is now running between 7 and 10 percent depending on the measure used.”

It seems they watched the State of the Union address recently and thought someone was confused.

Very confused. 

They write:

Anyone with even a slight understanding of how businesses work in the real world (which is quite obviously NOT the brainiacs in this White House) probably fell off their chairs laughing when Biden lectured that to reduce inflation “businesses will have to cut your costs, not your wages.” Brilliant, Joe. They probably never thought of that. It’s also going to be pretty tough to “cut your costs, not your wages” when energy, construction, and labor costs are surging. As one of the late-night comics put it last night: “Well one way to reduce costs would be to fire workers.”

When the authorities speak of inflation but say nothing about the entity that actually inflates the money supply, you are in the spin zone.  The goal is to conceal rather than to reveal.  And so it went with the President.

But the Committee to Unleash Prosperity wasn’t done yet.

Then old Joe told a whopper when he said that new vehicles accounted for a third of all inflation over the last year. New vehicles accounted for only 6% of inflation. Even if you add new and used vehicles together, it accounts for only 17% of inflation, half of what he claimed. Inflation is everywhere right now.

Former US Budget Director David Stockman found a couple more whoppers in the State of the Union including the President’s claim “that he had created a record 6.7 million new jobs during his first year in office, but even that was a lie.” 

Stockman explains:  

The 149.162 million jobs figure reported for December 2021 was actually 107,000 below the level of jobs the Donald had “created” as of August 2018 (149.269 million).

Of course, neither of these hot dogs had anything to do with “creating” jobs. Businessmen, investors, and entrepreneurs operating on the free market do that—even as government endlessly throws regulatory, tax and Nanny State obstacles in their path.

But in this case, Biden’s claims were especially egregious because every single one of those 6.7 million were “born again” jobs—jobs that had existed a few years back and were just now being recovered from the government-imposed Lockdown disaster of 2020.

In fact, the more relevant point is that at the end of Biden’s first year there were still 3.34 million fewer nonfarm payroll jobs than existed at the February 2020 pre-Covid peak. That is to say, we still have a goodly amount of born-again jobs to recapture before anyone can claim “new” jobs, even if they had nothing to do with them.

And then there was the approval-seeking remark from Biden about keeping the economy growing strong.  But the economy is not growing strong.  The latest GDP Now growth estimate from the Atlanta Fed is…  zero.  

That’s right, we are headed for zero growth in the first quarter.   

“And falling fast!”  

That is the add-on comment on the GDP decline from Michael Shedlock.  He says we are “careening towards recession.”

But it is not just recession.  It’s an inflationary recession

Better known as stagflation!

Do you own enough gold?