The Biden administration has been trying to sweet talk the media into giving them better coverage. Unfortunately for them, reality showed up again to kick them straight in the teeth.

And that reality is the rate of inflation is rising like this is the 1970’s all over again.

Consumer prices surged at the fastest pace in nearly four decades in November as Americans paid more for practically everything from groceries to cars to gasoline, solidifying hot inflation as a key trait of the economic recovery.”

The consumer price index rose 6.8% in November from a year ago, according to a new Labor Department report released Friday, marking the fastest increase since June 1982, when inflation hit 7.1%. The CPI – which measures a bevy of goods ranging from gasoline and health care to groceries and rents – jumped 0.8% in the one-month period from October.”

So-called core prices, which exclude more volatile measurements of food and energy, soared 4.9% in November from the previous year – a sharp increase from October, when it rose 4.6%. It was the steepest rate since 1991.”

Economists expected the index to show that prices surged 6.8% in November from the year-ago period and 0.7% from the previous month.”

Price increases were widespread: Energy prices jumped 3.5% in November and are up 33.3% year over year. Gasoline is a stunning 58.1% higher than it was a year ago. Food prices have also climbed 6.1% higher over the year, while used car and truck prices – a major component of the inflation increase – are up 31%.”

The reason that inflation is a killer for any of Team Biden’s hopes of seeing his poll numbers go back up is because it hits every single American right where they can see it – their wallet. There’s a reason that Ronald Reagan’s simple question in the 1980 presidential election – “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” – was the death knell of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The simple truth was that EVERYONE could see that they weren’t. And here is Biden, borrowing his foreign policy from the 1930’s and his economic policy from the 1970’s, and thinking that THIS TIME, it will be different, because his administration MEANS WELL. White House shadow president Chief of Staff Ron Klain tried a little Jedi-hand-waving trickery this morning on Twitter. It didn’t go well.
https://twitter.com/mallen_2010/status/1469316419623997443
By focusing on the WHOLE TWO CENTS that gas has dropped on average, the Biden administration is attempting to deflect from the reality that everyone sees when they go shopping. I went to the grocery store yesterday. I shop to feed a family of six. While I can still find “loss leaders” and coupon deals, and shop in bulk at Costco routinely (I’m feeding TEENAGERS, and anyone who has ever done that knows it is an expensive proposition), the price of everything has inched up. It might be a quarter here and fifty cents there, but that adds up quickly. (Not to mention the other trick that happens, the grocery store shrink, where the price stays the same but the size of the item shrinks.) Inflation is not always a shocking sudden price increase – it’s mostly being nickled and dimed and seeing the total on the receipt rise higher and higher. For those on fixed incomes, it is a horrific budget shock. And there is simply no spinning away the reality of less money in a person’s wallet.

Not that Biden and his handlers aren’t going to try. Their solution: SPEND MORE MONEY TO STOP INFLATION!

Biden statement on inflation:

“Developments in the weeks after these data were collected last month show that price and cost increase are slowing, although not as quickly as we’d like.” pic.twitter.com/3rZiTFT07y

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) December 10, 2021

For Team Biden, everything begins and ends with spending more money than has ever been printed. However, the Congressional Budget Office has just released its score on the “Build Back Better” bill, and… yeah. It’s exactly what you think.

President Biden’s sprawling social spending and climate plan could increase the federal budget deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade if the programs included in the spending bill are made permanent, according to a new Congressional Budget Office analysis released Friday.”

The $1.7 trillion Build Back Better bill passed by House Democrats last month would establish universal preschool, expand Medicaid, provide new funding for child care and offer green energy tax credits, though it notably omits progressive priorities like free community college and Medicare coverage of dental and vision. It relies on $1.95 trillion in new taxes, including a 15% corporate minimum and a surcharge aimed at ultramillionaires.”

The latest estimate from the nonpartisan budget agency was requested by Republicans, who have accused Democrats of using “budget gimmicks” to conceal the true cost of the legislation.”

The “budget gimmick” being used was putting end dates on the new social spending programs. However, the next step for a Democrat-controlled Congress would be to make those programs permanent. After all, whoever heard of a government program that was actually ENDED? But for scoring purposes, the programs were all given an end date in the budget in order to limit the total bill. The CBO just pointed out the obvious – make these “permanent” by extending them indefinitely through future budget bills, and you blow a hole in the deficit that makes it impossible for future generations to repay. And we have little chance of paying off the national debt NOW, without this!

But Biden is desperate to pull his poll numbers up, so he wants BBB passed. Spending gobs of money means he CARES, and the poll numbers are showing that the American people are pretty convinced that he does not care.

Biden, a career politician, has spent almost half a century making small talk to all types of people and speeches to all sorts of crowds. But his perceived capacity for empathy has been compromised by his attempts to appear sensitive to financial hardships amid the pandemic as consumer prices rise and the coming holidays are at risk of being complicated by supply chain kinks.”

“There are items every year that sell out, that are hard to find,” he said last week during prepared White House remarks on supply chains. “Some of you moms and dads may remember Cabbage Patch Kids back in the ‘80s or Beanie Babies in the ‘90s, or other toys that have run out at Christmas time in past years when there was no supply chain problem.”

Between supply chain issues that lead to empty shelves, inflation that increases the price on the remaining products, the ugly reality of energy price inflation, and the belief that Grandpa Joe is now so addled and coddled that he no longer knows or cares the way he pretended to do all these years, and Democrats are likely headed for a brutal pounding in 2022. And none of this even TOUCHES on the next big issue of Biden’s own making – tax refunds!

I'm still getting paper checks for my child tax credit b/c it's next to impossible to cancel

My sense is that the scale of theft and fraud with those checks is substantial, but we won't really know until April 2022

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) December 9, 2021

Brace yourselves, everyone, because things are only going to get uglier.

Featured image via Maklay62 on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license