As we head into the 2024 presidential election it is clear that President Biden is to blame for inflation and the approximately 37 percent increase in consumer prices since 2019.
Golly. Would that have anything to do with the 40 percent increase in M2 money supply in 2020-21?
On President Trump’s watch M2 went from $15.5 trillion in early 2020 to $19.4 trillion in early 2021. That’s an increase of 25 percent.
On President Biden’s watch M2 has gone from $19.4 trillion in early 2021 to $20.9 trillion in early 2024. That’s an increase of 8 percent. Mind you, M2 peaked at $22 trillion in April 2022. So in the first 15 months of Biden’s watch M2 went up over 13 percent.
So, who is to blame for the inflation? President Trump or President Biden?
Frankly, I’d say that President Trump is to blame. He listened to the pandemic experts Birx and Fauci and bought the lockdown and the Fed cranked into gear to print all the free money for handouts during the lockdown and here we are four years later.
Mind you, I’d say that the Bidenoids compounded the error by going for a full-on stimulus program and green energy bonanza in 2021. None of which expands the economy.
(I mean, haven’t we learned from the New Deal stimulus that failed in the 1930s and the Obama stimulus that failed in the 2010s?)
But I don’t read anyone threading the needle as I have just done. The fact is that all this economic pain is taking place on Biden’s watch, and so he is to blame.
But just suppose that Trump had been reelected in 2020. My judgement is that we would still have experienced most of the 37 percent increase in prices, even though we wouldn’t have gone full bore on the green stuff. And probably the economy would have done better than it has in the pedal-to-the-metal green stimulus spending binge of the last three years.
My judgement is that if Trump had served a second term Republicans would be facing a total wipeout in November 2024. Because all the bad stuff happened on Trump’s watch.
And just imagine what the Democrats would be doing in 2025.
Instead we had all the bad stuff happening on Biden’s watch, and average people are really starting to feel the bite from green energy spending and regulation and EV mandates. And they hate it. And it doesn’t hurt that all the DEI stuff is wrecking education from K-grad school. And corporations are starting to ease up on ESG.
What I am saying is that things are aligning pretty well for a Reagan 2.0 if the next Trump administration gets a Republican Congress and goes hard on spending reductions, tax rate cuts, regulation elimination, and bureaucrat reduction.
And that would never have a chance to happen if Trump had been president in the aftermath of the COVID stupidities.
Then there are the other disasters: the bungled retreat from Kabul, the Ukraine quagmire, the Hamas bloodbath. I wonder if Trump could have stopped all that, given that Kabul and Ukraine are just steady-as-she-goes intelligence community / Defense community / State Department agenda.