As the saying goes, war makes for strange bedfellows, and as forty year high inflation and its potential to hurt President Biden and the Democrats midterm election prospects the Associated Press is desperate to deflect blame. How do you protect an incumbent president from historically bad economic data when a Democratic strategist famously said in respect to what swings elections “its the economy stupid”?
The strategy involves parroting Big Business talking points. They reported that inflation is mainly being caused by labor shortages which are causing businesses to increase wages. This economic talking point is often deployed by businesses when explaining why they have had to increase prices. It is because of labor costs they tell us.
This argument is usually skewered by the Left and their minions in the media. They would argue that this is shifting blame for price increases from the 1% to the working class. Not this time though. You see the stakes are too high as the Democrats are set to suffer their worst losses in midterm elections in history.
This strategy allows the Democrats to blame Trump. “Immigration rates have dropped significantly in recent years as a result of restrictions enacted by former President Donald Trump’s administration. According to the AP, if immigration rates remained at the same pace it was prior to Trump’s tenure… the US would have 2 million more immigrants than it does now.” However, this claim really bolsters what Trump and other immigration restrictionists have been claiming for years: that immigration artificially depresses native born Americans wages while increasing corporations profits.
Imagine telling Americans that inflation is their fault because they are making too much money. Effectively that is what the Democrats and the media are doing with “news” stories like this. All to win an election.
Is this claim true? Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman famously said that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” So really the American people earning more money or businesses having labor shortages are not the cause of this inflation. The real blame, like with most things, lies with the government. Their economic lockdowns and the resulting 6 trillion dollars of “stimulus” and “relief” are to blame. Realistically most of the blame for these government induced problems should be at the feet of the Democrats who pushed the hysteria that was the COVID lockdowns.
Thankfully we don’t have to rely on arcane debates on economic policy or woe is me stories from biased business owners to know what an economy with nearly no immigration would look like. We have the real world example of Japan. Its population has been declining for years, yet they have not increased immigration to their country. According to the AP and Big Business, inflation must be rampant because employers have to outbid each other for every worker. The exact opposite is the case. Their central bank has been trying for years to achieve higher inflation. Of course there is a downside to this type of economic condition, namely slow growth. With the ideological leanings of the left you would think they would be willing to pay this price.
News analysis that cut against these organizations ideological leanings show that they are not the unbiased arbiters of the news they present themselves as. They are actually political actors who have a side that they will do anything to protect, even spewing their enemies talking points. If the Democrat voting base cared about anything other than political power they would be up in arms over this naked attempt to blame the working class for inflation. Alas they don’t.
