Pollster TIPP (TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics) reported on Monday that even Democrats have ceased buying the canard that Vladimir Putin, oil companies, or shipping companies are the underlying cause of inflation. Wrote Terry Jones, an editor with Issues & Insights, which partnered with TIPP:
Most surprising … Democrats have thrown in the towel on Biden’s economic leadership, with 53% blaming Biden’s policies for inflation.
A majority of every other group except those calling themselves “liberals” see Biden and the Democrats’ policies as the root cause of the diminishing purchasing power of their paychecks:
Indeed, of all the major demographic groupings followed by the I&I/TIPP Poll, just one was below 50% overall: self-described “liberals.”
All the other groups, including blacks (61%), Hispanics (61%), men (68%), women (61%), along with every income group, every age group, and every education group, all felt Biden’s policies caused the current inflation mess.
TIPP asked the 1,300 people they polled the first week of June a follow up question: “Does excessive government spending … ‘worsen inflation,’, ‘lessen inflation,’ or ‘not sure.’” Nearly 90 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of independents said “excessive government spending” was the root cause, while more than half of Democrats agreed.
This is an astounding result. For years, Keynesian economist Paul Samuelson brainwashed college students into thinking it was a “demand-pull” concoction that was to blame. In his college textbook Economics — the bible taught in introductory economics classes for decades in nearly every major university in the country — Samuelson tried to explain it:
Demand-Pull inflation arises when the aggregate demand increases more than the economy’s potential for productivity which leads to rise in Prices so as to have a new equilibrium with the Aggregate Supply.
Any student who could memorize this for the final exam would pass. Anyone who questioned its falsity — like the little boy declaring that “the emperor is naked!” — would fail.
This writer is a product of that system, and that canard.
Happily, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, with degrees from both Harvard and Yale, has recovered from the Keynesian myth. On Friday, he gave reporters a lesson in real-world economics:
I think it’s sad to see some of the economic numbers with Bidenflation coming out — 8.6 percent. They tried to say — first, they said it wasn’t going to happen, was transitory and it would basically kind of solve itself.
They said it was gonna moderate two months ago and now it’s accelerating, and you have energy, groceries, all the things that really, really matter are just going through the roof … [these] are the results that we’re seeing with this inflation report.
Unfortunately, as a result of a lot of bad policy … you don’t declare war on American energy and undercut our energy independence and think that that’s gonna lead to more affordable energy for people….
You don’t print trillions and trillions of dollars and think that that’s somehow not gonna be reflected in rising prices and rising inflation.
DeSantis failed to clarify that while Biden has supported big government spending, it is Congress, working with and through the U.S Treasury and the Federal Reserve System, which is also to blame. Instead of Keynesian myths it’s common sense: One cannot increase the amount of currency in circulation without diluting the purchasing power of each unit of that currency.
And it was Republican President Richard Nixon who unleashed the inflation tiger back in 1971 when he unilaterally removed the last tie the dollar had to gold. That tiger will, if the present rate of inflation (eight percent per year, using government figures) continues, reduce the purchasing power of today’s already-weak and weakening dollar to just fifty cents in nine years.
It’s nice to know that Democrats are finally owning up to their part in the destruction of it.
