As cant and emotionalism subside, it is becoming possible to give a clear and fair assessment of the performance of the Biden Administration and of the president himself: a total failure.
The shortfall of 500,000 in the expected net new job figures for August shows that stagflation is upon us: employers are afraid to hire employees as they normally would coming out of the COVID recession because they don’t know if they will be able to afford them. Hourly pay scales are increasing at 7.5 percent, new car prices at 10 percent, rental accommodation at 12 percent, and new homes at 20 percent, all well ahead of the official rate of inflation, contrary to the smug assurances of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and even some Federal Reserve spokespeople, that inflation was a mere bubble.
Historically, the only sustainable way of fighting stagflation has been to counter inflation with increased supply and achieve that goal and the corresponding non-inflationary increase in demand through the encouragement of demand in the tax system. The present administration is committed to raising taxes and to colossal spending increases, which will exacerbate both stagnation and inflation.
After 13 years of negligible interest rates, there isn’t much that’s useful left in the toolbox. The inflation of the sort that is already building up historically has been attacked by reducing demand and sharply increasing interest rates. Any such policy now would produce a disaster that would be a fiscal and monetary replication of the debacle in Afghanistan. Not since Herbert Hoover prescribed higher taxes, higher tariffs, and a shrinkage of the money supply as the remedy for the Great Depression has an American administration more poorly judged the policy prescriptions necessary to fight deteriorating economic conditions.
Biden’s answer to the surge in violent crime rates across urban America is pious lectures about guns, which incites both the anti-gun Left and the huge number of Americans
(who consider their guns security against what otherwise would be a riptide of crime) to believe that guns are about to be confiscated unconstitutionally. The answer to crime rates is not in the suppression of access to guns for responsible citizens, as criminals always have guns; the answer is in greater numbers of better-trained police personnel and longer sentences for violent criminals.
The open artery at the southern border where the nodding Homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, repeated for six months that “the border is closed” saw 1.2 million people swarm illegally into the United States, many thousands of them on live television. Mayorkas has been overheard to say that the status of the border is “unsustainable,” but this assessment seems not to have reached Washington. All of these problems—stagflation, violent urban crime, and a flood of illegal immigrants—appear to be worsening, not improving, while the Democratic leaders in the Congress pursue their socialist and authoritarian objectives as best they can. Which will not be very efficiently, as their party’s standing plummets in public esteem.
As the smoke clears from above the disaster in Afghanistan, it is possible to assess the administration‘s performance dispassionately: the president lied to the country about conditions in Afghanistan and in the infamous July 23 conversation with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, he urged a policy of misinformation to conceal the erosion of the military balance from the American public. He promised to extract all Americans and failed to do so. He said the war was over; it is a war on terror and of course it is not over and may now be expected to escalate. He falsely attempted to blame former Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, who all have some mistakes to answer for but are in no way responsible for this debacle.