Biden: Can you believe how much things cost right now? Including gas?

Wait until Grandpa Simpson here finds out who the president is. Won’t he be surprised to learn where this particular buck stops.

Maybe his staff should tell him that Jimmy Carter’s still in charge. It wouldn’t be far from the truth.

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The RNC had fun snipping short soundbites from Biden’s remarks this afternoon about this morning’s brutal inflation report. The only good news for Democrats today is that a presidential address on the topic means the White House is now officially taking this problem Very Seriously. Hand-waving about “transitory inflation” isn’t going to cut it anymore, not after last week’s election results.

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. The president is now admitting it, and making a bunch of Republican attack ads in the process:

The RNC is right about wages. The number on your biweekly paycheck may be inching up but not as quickly as prices are:

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Biden assured his audience that he’d spoken this week with major retailers like Walmart and shipping leviathans like UPS and FedEx and they told him that the stores will be stocked this holiday season. I hope he’s right for everyone’s sake, including his. A toy shortage before Christmas is a trivial problem in the grand scheme of things but a major political problem potentially as it’s the sort of thing voters will remember when forming a judgment about whether their lives are better under the new administration.

Meanwhile, what about supermarket shelves? Will they be stocked too or will it be pizza for Thanksgiving this year?

By the end of October turkeys were over 60% out of stock—lower than the same time last year by more than 30 percentage points. A spokesperson for Butterball LLC, one of the largest U.S. turkey processors, said the company has been experiencing similar labor and supply challenges as other organizations and industries…

Essential ingredients might not be the only things absent from Thanksgiving dinner this year. Guests traveling will be faced with car rental and gas prices the highest they have been in seven years.

Rental-car fleets have experienced shortages for months, and are expected to continue into the holiday season.

It’d be nice at least if families could gather for Thanksgiving with confidence that they’ll be safe from COVID as they sit down at the table to carve the tofurky they bought at the last minute because the real thing wasn’t available. But there’s a shortage of rapid COVID tests too, thanks partly to the FDA’s inexcusable bureaucratic sluggishness in approving new tests for the market and partly to Biden’s administration having taken steps to address the test shortage far too belatedly.

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In the end, his solution to the inflation crisis involved two wholly predictable points. First, never forget that it’s not really his fault. It’s COVID’s, and globalization’s.

It’s also your fault, sort of:

Second, and coincidentally, the way out of the crisis is precisely the same policies that Democrats preferred before inflation really began to bite:

President Biden said the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in the House of Representatives on Friday will lower the price of consumer goods, in a speech at the Baltimore port on Wednesday.

“Along with other plans that I’m advancing, this bill is going to reduce the cost of goods to consumers, businesses, and get people back to work, helping us build an economy . . . where everybody’s better off,” Biden said.

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He hasn’t given the country the hard sell yet on how the reconciliation social-welfare mega-bill will also somehow reduce inflation, but it’s coming. He sketched out the argument in the statement he issued this morning following the inflation news. Soon American media will be overflowing with talking points about how the only way to ease rising prices is to inject another $1.75 trillion in spending into the economy.

Think Joe Manchin will buy it? Stay tuned.

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