Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (CA) on Thursday slammed President Joe Biden for failing to reduce 40-year-high inflation.
In a New York Times article titled, “There Is Way More Biden Can Do to Lower Prices,” Khanna scolded Biden for failing to create a feasible plan to reduce the inflation his administration fueled.
“There is no patience for incrementalism or political spin about economic numbers in these times. Democrats can’t just blame the Republicans for lacking a plan,” he wrote. “People elected us to solve problems. We told them that government could improve their lives and they want to see tangible action, movement and energy out of Washington.”
Khanna recognized Biden had mounted a public relations campaign to shift the blame of inflation onto others but suggested a public relations campaign is not sufficient to reduce costs for Americans. “We need an all-out mobilization, not just a few ad hoc initiatives reacting to headlines,” he continued.
The article suggested three big government ideas for Biden to consider: 1) The federal government should buy energy and resell it to the American people for less money, 2) Biden should assemble a task force “to lower and stabilize short-term prices of volatile goods like food and fuel,” 3) Biden should “provide generous wage subsidies for American workers during the shortages.”
All three of Khanna’s suggestions are consistent with the Democrats’ political philosophy of growing the federal government to fix crises. Yet he called on Biden to reject the typical Democrat “orthodoxy” to take “decisive action.”
“Let’s reject the orthodoxy that makes us timid and dilatory about government intervention and show that our government is still capable of decisive action when it comes to both demand and supply,” he wrote.
Khanna, a far-left populist House member, failed to mention that Biden could attack inflation by ending his war on American energy. Breitbart News reported on Biden’s war on American energy:
Biden has waged war on both public and private financing of oil drilling while subsidizing green-new-deal-like energy plans. As a result, American oil production is down from 2019, the year before the pandemic. Hard numbers suggest 2022 oil production is 12 million barrels per day, or eight percent less than in 2019.
Biden has made it increasingly more difficult for oil companies to gain financing to drill on private lands. He has also halted new drilling on public lands and terminated the Keystone Pipeline project that would have transported vast amounts of oil to American refineries.
With gas prices setting another record of $4.715 on Thursday, inflation will cost American households on average an extra $5,200 in 2022, or $433 per month, according to Bloomberg. Inflation is also set to delay 25 percent of Americans from retirement, a BMO Real Financial Progress Index survey revealed.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter and Gettr @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.