"That Guy. Over There. It's His Fault."

Veronique de Rugy points out a recurring theme: Biden Points the Bill (and the Blame) Elsewhere.

Government overspending, an activity the Biden administration has taken to a new level, has sent the country into an inflationary spiral. Through trillions of dollars in COVID-19 relief programs, infrastructure spending, vote-buying student loan forgiveness programs and a political "Build Back Better Agenda," the White House has flooded the economy and decimated consumers' purchasing power. We're paying more and getting less for everything from energy to food.

According to the House Budget Committee, the average family of four is paying around $1,143 more each month than it was in early 2021 for the same goods and services; this includes increased gasoline costs. Rather than reversing course, President Joe Biden is telling voters the private sector is to blame and that he has the answers. He's doubling down by proposing more stifling, job-killing regulations to "fix" the problem — regulations which will inevitably send inflation to new heights.

That's the way I'd bet too.

Also of note:

  • Wimps. Just last month, our local Hamas cheerleaders congratulated themselves in my local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat, for getting arrested for trespassing after refusing to leave the office of their (and my) CongressCritter, Chris Pappas.

    At the time, they proudly trumpeted their "willingness to face the consequences of civil disobedience".

    But now‥ not so much: Five plead not guilty to trespassing as they press Rep. Pappas in Dover on war in Gaza.

    Five people arrested at U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas’ Dover office in May after a protest against the war in Gaza have pleaded not guilty to criminal trespass and are scheduled to head to trial in the fall.

    The trial is scheduled for October. So they might be willing to face the consequences, but not soon, and not without a fight.

  • Thank your local mogul. Michael R. Strain writes In Defense of Billionaires,

    Billionaires should not exist,” argues Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has long described himself as a democratic socialist. Indeed, “every billionaire is a policy failure” is a relatively common slogan among American progressives.

    To demonstrate the horseshoe nature of the political spectrum, Strain points out another example…

    But:

    Billionaire innovators create enormous value for society. In a 2004 paper, the Nobel laureate economist William D. Nordhaus found “that only a minuscule fraction” – about 2.2% – “of the social returns from technological advances” accrued to innovators themselves. The rest of the benefits (which is to say, almost all of them) went to consumers.

    According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is worth $170 billion. Extrapolating from Nordhaus’s findings, one could conclude that Bezos has created over $8 trillion – more than one-third of the United States’ annual GDP – in value for society. For example, Amazon has reduced the price of many consumer goods and freed up an enormous amount of time for millions of Americans by eliminating the need to visit brick-and-mortar retailers. Bezos, meanwhile, has received only a tiny slice of those social benefits.

    I understand why political types like Sanders and Bannon despise billionaires: because billionaires provide ordinary people, directly or indirectly, with goods and services that they actually want, as demonstrated by their willingness to open their wallets.

    Government, on the other hand, will only give you what it thinks you should have. And make you pay for it.

  • It helped that Hunter is a blithering idiot. Andrew C. McCarthy disdains The DOJ’s Undeserved Victory Lap over Hunter’s Convictions.

    In the wake of Hunter Biden’s conviction on three slam-dunk felony firearm charges, we’ve now had a victory-lap press conference by so-called special counsel David Weiss, and the predictable chest-beating by Biden apologists about how the president’s Justice Department courageously prosecuted the president’s son without fear or favor.

    Astonishing chutzpah, even from this crowd.

    The crimes found by the jury were committed on October 12, 2018, and were fully known to law enforcement within less than two weeks when the gun was recovered after the defendant’s then-girlfriend — the wife of his late brother, whom he’d also gotten hooked on crack — took the Colt Cobra .38, which he’d illegally purchased while lying on the required federal form, and recklessly discarded it in a trash bin near a school, out of fear that in his drug-addled state he’d hurt himself or others. If the defendant’s name had been Robert Hunter Smith, any normal federal prosecutor would have prosecuted him for these crimes by early 2019, if not sooner — and there’d have been no concerns about the Secret Service mysteriously intervening to make the damning evidence disappear.

    But the defendant was named Robert Hunter Biden and the federal prosecutor was the abnormally political David Weiss, so the prosecution took six years — and if Weiss and the Biden Justice Department had had their way, it wouldn’t have happened at all.

    Not a gifted link, sorry.

  • But I was assured… Speaking of long-delayed justice, Jazz Shaw relates: Connecticut Dems Arrested After Voter Fraud Debacle.

    The wheels of justice turn slowly, as the saying goes. That seems to be particularly true in Connecticut. As you may recall, the mayoral election in Bridgeport, Connecticut last year was so riddled with election fraud involving mass mail-in voting that a judge ordered both the primary and general elections to be rerun. That wasn't the city's first run-in with that sort of cheating. During the 2019 elections, other allegations of "mishandling" absentee ballots were raised, leading to a police investigation. But this week, long after the dust had allegedly settled, arrests were finally made in these cases. Bridgeport Democratic Town Committee Vice Chair Wanda Geter-Pataky and City Council Member Alfredo Castillo were charged with unlawful possession of absentee ballots and other election law violations. Two campaign workers - also Democrats - were also charged.

    It might have gone unnoticed, but the alleged perpetrators seem to have been extremely inept.

    The problem with "easy" voting is that it makes fraud easy too. It's claimed there's "no evidence" of widespread voter fraud, but that's because the system is designed to not detect fraud.