The Patriot Post® · Biden's '70s Show on Inflation

Politicians talk. It’s what they do. And Joe Biden, having been a politician for the past half-century, is no exception.

These days, he’s been talking a lot about the economy and how he plans to fix it. He’s also been slinging a lot of blame at everyone from his White House predecessor to second-world tyrants to evil corporate entities. In fact, Joe Biden will have you know he’s just about the only blameless person when it comes to our rampant inflation, deadly consumer shortages, and total lack of confidence in the economy.

The facts, though, are stubborn things. Biden’s policies are at the very heart of our historic inflationary surge — whether through unchecked federal spending or unwarranted government meddling in the economy.

As one politician of yore so eloquently put it when confronted with runaway inflation, “We must bring these problems under control, and the first place to start is with the cost of government.”

That politician was none other than Joe Biden. As an ambitious young senator in the 1970s, Biden had no shortage of opinions about how to fix the economic malaise that plagued the country and two successive presidents. But his views then seem remarkably at odds with his current rhetoric.

In the early ‘70s, Biden portrayed himself as part of a new generation of Democrats who wanted to get away from the big government orthodoxy of the New Deal and the Great Society — massive federal programs that grew the size of government but never really moved the needle on poverty or prosperity. “We newer liberal Democrats,” he said during his run for the Senate in 1972, “are rejecting the theory of our more senior colleagues, which was that if you spend enough money you can solve any problem.”

Biden chastised his fellow Democrats for abandoning the middle class. “I think the victim in the last 10 years hasn’t been the poor and it hasn’t been the wealthy,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1974. “It’s been the middle-class guy. … Now he’s finding he’s been had.”

In the mid '70s, Senator Biden went after Republican President Gerald Ford for not doing enough about high gas prices. He also warned that a corporate tax hike was ill-timed. Around that time, Biden forged a reputation as one of the stingiest senators in Congress. He challenged spending bills, and he attacked certain programs as wasteful and ill-conceived. When he ran for reelection in 1978, his signature selling point was passing a sunset bill that would compel a review of government spending every four years to weed out wasteful programs. (We can hear you thinking: Wait, Joe Biden did that? Isn’t he attacking Republicans for that very proposal now?)

Too bad he lost sight of his own past. The Joe Biden of the 1970s knew what to do about inflation and the lousy economy. The Joe Biden of 2022 seems clueless. What happened?

The most potent enemy a politician faces is often his own mouth. This is certainly the case with Biden, as evidenced by five decades’ worth of gaffes, glitches, inanities, and idiocies. This isn’t an inevitable trap for all politicians, though — only those who don’t have a true moral compass or strong convictions based on a logical worldview. These pols tend to say what’s popular at the time because they’re focused on staying in office and helping their like-minded colleagues do the same.

During the 1970s, Joe Biden survived an anti-government wave that led to the rise of Ronald Reagan and the dawning of a new conservative era. Biden’s very survival at the time depended on being a centrist and on voting in lockstep with the polls. That’s why he never truly differentiated himself in the Senate and why his 1988 presidential run went up in smoke, not unlike Kamala Harris’s campaign did during the 2020 cycle.

Biden became president not because he suddenly became a better candidate but because he wasn’t Donald Trump. Biden was in the right place at the right time — a backslapper and a mediocre politician who simply followed the political winds.

Never bright and now utterly diminished, he’s the tool of the leftists who took over the Democrat Party and are deeply committed to Big Government. In short, Joe Biden and his policies haven’t aged well.