The Patriot Post® · Biden's Supply Chain Gang Aims to Control Everything You Consume

By Nate Jackson ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/102500-bidens-supply-chain-gang-aims-to-control-everything-you-consume-2023-11-29

“We’re from the government. We’re here to help,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona while butchering Ronald Reagan’s famous pronouncement about “the nine most terrifying words in the English language.”

Cardona not only missed the entire point of The Gipper’s too-true joke, he exemplified it. So too does Joe Biden’s new White House Council on Supply Chain Resilience.

The administration’s “fact sheet” about his supply chain gang lists a bunch of focus-grouped bromides: “These actions will help Americans get the products they need when they need them, enable reliable deliveries for businesses, strengthen our agriculture and food systems, and support good-paying, union jobs here at home.” And it will be co-chaired by basically Biden’s entire Cabinet.

What could go wrong?

Plenty. The supply chain woes that beset Americans with higher prices and shortages of goods in recent years were largely caused by the government response to COVID. To be sure, that began before Biden’s election, when Democrat governors and mayors around the nation were following the pronouncements of Anthony Fauci. But Team Biden took an economy well on the way to recovering and saddled it with massive government spending and regulation, igniting a wildfire of inflation.

To sum up the “new” White House plan, it’s the same as the old plan — to utilize the force of government to control supplies and processes. That will only mean big government control, intrusive mandates, and bureaucratic direction of everything you consume, followed by more distorted supplies and higher prices.

In some ways, we’re left wondering why Biden thinks this is necessary when his economy is going just swimmingly. He said so during his announcement of this supply chain council:

You know, from turkey, to air travel, to a tank of gas, costs went down. They went down. Now, to people making a lot of money, that doesn’t matter a whole lot because the costs are relatively small compared to wealthy incomes. In fact, as a share of earnings, this Thanksgiving dinner was the fourth-cheapest ever on record. And I want you all to know that. … Wages for working families have gone up while inflation has come down 65% — giving families a little more money in their pockets and a little more breathing room this holiday season.

Virtually every word of that is false.

Wages have gone up, but not as fast as inflation. By “costs went down” and “inflation has come down 65%,” Biden means that the annual rate of inflation has slowed somewhat since its peak of 9.1% in June 2022. And to say that “Thanksgiving dinner was the fourth-cheapest ever on record” is a really twisted reading of the statistics from the American Farm Bureau Federation. The same report from the Federation said “a Thanksgiving meal is still 25% higher than it was in 2019, which highlights the impact high supply costs and inflation have had on food prices since before the pandemic.”

Not to worry; Biden’s supply chain gang will fix it!

In any case, we’ve written till we’re blue in the face about inflation, usually making sure to put monthly numbers in broader context of cumulative inflation. The Leftmedia, by contrast, is busy churning out pieces with titles like “The economy is great, so why doesn’t everyone love Joe Biden?” Thus we were gratified to see a couple of mainstream media outlets finally do what we’ve been doing — at virtually the same time Biden was telling lies.

“It now requires $119.27 to buy the same goods and services a family could afford with $100 before the pandemic,” reports Bloomberg. “Since early 2020, prices have risen about as much as they had in the full 10 years preceding the health emergency.”

Moreover: “It’s hard to find an area of a household budget that’s been spared: Groceries are up 25% since January 2020. Same with electricity. Used-car prices have climbed 35%, auto insurance 33% and rents roughly 20%.”

Care to guess how much grocery prices increased in the four years before the pandemic? Less than 1%.

Another mainstream media report, this time from CBS News, corroborates the misery: “The typical American household must spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed in January of 2021, right before inflation soared to 40-year highs.”

And the conclusion is obvious: “Those figures help explain why Americans continue to register strong dissatisfaction with the economy,” Bloomberg added. “Consumers’ daily routines have largely returned to their pre-pandemic normal, but the cost of living has not.”

As Peter Doocy so artfully asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “So, is it your sense that when people are home for Thanksgiving, catching up with their family members, they were saying to each other, ‘Can you believe how much more affordable things have gotten?’”

All KJP could do was stammer her way to huffing, “It’s not a joke to us.”

Team Biden totally screwing up the economy isn’t a joke to us either.

Back to Biden’s supply chain gang, one notable supply issue is the glut of electric vehicles, thanks to government “incentives” and diktats outpacing market demand. Nearly 4,000 car dealers wrote to the Biden administration Tuesday appealing for relief because unwanted and very expensive EVs are sitting on dealer lots for nearly twice the average time for gas cars. We can expect Biden’s management of the rest of the supply chain to work just as well.

Meanwhile, the president also tipped his hand with one thing we expect will be a focus of his supply chain council: greedy corporations. “Any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even as the supply chains have been rebuilt, it’s time to stop the price gouging,” Biden warned.

In other words, the Biden administration will be looking for villains to punish when prices don’t magically come down because the president said they should. And those villains will not be the real culprits.

Remember all of this when Biden repeats his refrain, “Bidenomics is working.”

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