Biden staff indifferent to suffering caused by inflationary policies

 NY Post Editorial:

President Joe Biden’s chief of staff brushes off record-high inflation and the supply-chain crisis helping fuel it as “high class problems.” It’s a stunning admission of indifference from a well-connected multimillionaire — but just the latest example of this administration’s cluelessness about Americans’ suffering from its failures.

“This,” Ron Klain emphasized Wednesday in quote-tweeting Harvard economist Jason Furman, who wrote, “Most of the economic problems we’re facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems. We wouldn’t have had them if the unemployment rate was still 10 percent. We would instead have had a much worse problem.”

Fine: The rising cost of everything from groceries to diapers to cars is no problem for Klain, who’s worth between $4.4 million and $12.2 million.

But food, fuel and housing are costing households at the $70,000 median annual income an extra $175 a month. The Consumer Price Index rose 5.4 percent last month from a year ago, and wholesale prices jumped a record 8.6 percent. Such inflation hits working Americans and those on fixed incomes, such as seniors, the hardest.

With most Americans vaccinated, we should be well on our way back to the pre-pandemic booming economy, which saw just 3.5 percent unemployment in February 2020. Instead, nearly 40 percent of US households report serious financial difficulties, such as trouble paying utility bills, in recent months; it’s 60 percent among households earning under 50 grand a year.

They can thank Biden and the Democrats. Throwing trillions into an already-recovering economy was bound to lead to inflation, as was boosting unemployment benefits $300 a week until September. The resulting rise in demand and worker shortage have also contributed to the supply-chain mess, with a record number of job openings in the trucking industry. A backlog of nearly 100 cargo ships has sat for a month off Southern California, unable to unload goods at ports that handle more than half of American imports.
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I think there should also be an investigation of California state regulations that are impacting interstate commerce and restricting the movement of supplies from ships and from farmers.  California's restriction on water usage while sending the water to bain fish and the ocean should be investigated as an impediment to interstate commerce too.