Enough about Joe Biden's mindless nastiness. I'll take my cue from Donald Trump and Biden himself and focus on policy this morning.

Specifically, let's talk about Joe Biden's mindless and nasty demagoguery on economic policies. Faced with the electoral consequences of his corrosive inflationary wave, especially in shelter costs, Biden has to come up with some promised policy solution. And that is ... federal rent control:

President Joe Biden is ready to propose a 5% cap on annual rent increases for tenants of major landlords as he tries to show he’s doing something about the high cost of housing, according to a person familiar with the plan.

The proposal, to be announced while the president visits Nevada on Tuesday, is being championed by Biden in the middle of a tense presidential campaign and a time when housing costs have been a major driver of overall inflation.

Price controls! Yes, those always work, don't they?

We'll get back to that in a moment, but first let's focus on fundamentals. What authority does the federal government have to regulate rents? Property rentals are as local as it gets. It cannot be viewed as interstate commerce in any sense of the word, not even under the dumbest possible interpretation of Wickard v Filburn. Real property exists in fixed locations within states, counties, and cities. Those jurisdictions have authority to regulate rents, but Congress and the federal executive branch have no jurisdiction at all to do so.

It's worth noting that the Department of Housing and Urban Development does negotiate rent prices, but only indirectly through voucher programs. Those are voluntary, however, and run under the jurisdiction of state and local authorities (public housing agencies or PHAs). HUD also assists people in finding and paying for public housing, but again, those projects are run under state and local jurisdictions along with some federal subsidies that might give HUD some leverage in keeping rent prices from going up too fast.

But that leverage only exists in public housing, and only by working through state and local agencies. HUD does not have any authority to set rental prices or cap increases. And neither does Joe Biden, especially not in rentals outside the public-housing sector, as he's promising to do. 

This is not a serious proposal, in other words, but even if it were, it'd be mindless. Rents are not escalating because of greed, although that's what Biden will claim. Rents are going up because cities have zoning and other regulations that discourage housing construction. States also employ tax and environmental policies that delay and discourage construction, especially blue states like California. Population growth creates more demand for housing, but without adding enough residential units to keep up, the demand drives the prices up. 

Price controls don't solve that problem. Cities have used rent control for decades as a way to keep renters from experiencing the price signals of bad policies enacted by local and state politicians, and it's been a disaster without escape all along. That leaves renters basically locked into their current location unnecessarily and forces new entrants into the market to pay premiums for housing that are equally unnecessary as landlords have to make up the losses from long-term renters. As the return on investment drops, so does interest in providing unit growth that keeps up with demand -- and eventually so does the maintenance and support for renters. 

But again, Biden's not being serious. He wants another election line about 'corporate greed' being the source of the massive inflationary wave that set American households back a decade or more, thanks to his ill-considered American Rescue Plan in March 2021. Biden got warned -- by Larry Summers and others -- that dumping that much cash into a supply-chain-crisis economy would send inflation into the stratosphere. Biden did it anyway to prove he was smarter than his critics. 

Now Biden wants to demagogue his way out of his own trap by casting landlords as evil greedy b*****ds, as a distraction from his own incompetence. And never mind the Constitution or the limits of power, because Biden's trying to save muh democracy, or something. It's a lame and tired example of Biden's lame and tired narcissism, and yet another example of why my opinion of Joe Biden hasn't changed since 1987: He's twenty pounds of bull**** in a ten-pound bag. 

On policy, too.