There’s an old saying: All politics is local.
That means that while national candidates present all kinds of promises and platitudes about war, peace, the environment and the nation’s place in the world, the important things often are what directly affect the average person.
So, Biden-voting moms, have you priced diapers lately? Toilet paper? Tissues?
You’ve probably noticed there’s a new monster in the neighborhood — and it’s not something leftover from Halloween. The new monster is inflation, which brings to mind another political saying: Elections have consequences.
The 2020 election has affected American interests in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and at the southern border. But in the most basic of areas — taking care of infants and small children — new parents, most of whom are careful in budgeting, are seeing inflation day-by-day on needed commodities for their households.
Commodities like paper products.
“The Kimberly-Clark Company recently announced higher costs for baby-, child- and adult-care products and Scott toilet tissue,” WYZZ-TV reported last week. “This is the company’s second price hike of the year.
“The maker of Kleenex tissues and Huggies diapers is blaming labor, freight and material prices and shortages … Recently, Proctor & Gamble and Unilever also released information on price hikes to offset supply chain issues.”
Try running a household without diapers, toilet paper or tissues when there are needy little ones. Increased stress, no doubt, especially if one is a new or single parent.
And it’s more than diapers and paper products. The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show prices for meat, poultry, fish and eggs rose by a whopping 10.5 percent over the last year.
Let’s not even talk about what we’re seeing at the gas pump.
It’s because elections have consequences.
Not so, say the usual suspects, including leftist media like Intelligencer (“Bidenomics has proved to be a smashing success”), The Washington Post (“Biden officials are struggling to explain an economic recovery like no other”), and NBC News (“Biden is counting on a robust economic recovery to keep his popularity and his agenda alive”).
But even some establishment outlets couldn’t turn a blind eye: “It’s time to sound the inflation alarm in the White House,” wrote Matt Egan in a May analysis for CNN Business.
Even with that warning, though, Egan retained team loyalty, saying we’ve been spared from — gasp! — the nightmare of low prices. “For many years, the nightmare for the US economy was a Japanese-style spiral of falling prices,” he wrote.
Nonsense. Low prices have not been a problem for this country since the depression of 90 years ago.
To his credit, Egan referred to a Washington Post Op-Ed in which Lawrence Summers, a top U.S. Treasury official from the Clinton era, said inflation is not temporary, despite the claims of the Biden administration.
And those alarms from Egan and Summers were five months ago! Since that time, the annual inflation rate, according to August figures released by Statista, has been hovering at about 5 percent.
As a comparison, the annual inflation rate in the waning months of the Trump administration was less than 1.5 percent, immediately jumping to 1.7 percent during President Joe Biden’s first full month in office.
Elections have consequences.
“But,” you say, “it’s not all Biden’s fault. There was the COVID, and the lockdowns, and the lost businesses, and the stimulus and the…”
Of course. But do you think we would be where we are now if former President Donald Trump was still in the White House? Love him or hate him, the guy has a knack for solving problems.
Though you still might not like those mean tweets if he were in office, compared to what we have now, the tweets could very well have been the biggest of our problems.
They wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. Or a pack of high-priced diapers.
via westernjournal