What a great day,’ Biden says while celebrating the so-called Inflation Reduction Act
Thank God for the media. The American people are obviously too dumb for their own good. They need professional journalists with elite educations and morally superior opinions to tell them what to care about and precisely how much to care about that thing.
Most Americans, for example, might have been somewhat concerned after learning that U.S. consumer prices remained high at 8.3 percent year on year and then watching the stock market plummet in response. Good thing our beloved media professionals were standing by to disabuse us of our ignorant assumptions. As it turns out, these journalists explained, 8.3 percent inflation is actually a good thing and Democrats deserve credit for saving the American economy.
Days before the inflation report was published, Washington Post reporter Abha Bhattarai celebrated the fact that Americans “are finally starting to feel better about the economy and more resigned to inflation.” When the ostensibly concerning inflation number was revealed on Tuesday, mainstream journalists went out of their way to sanitize the news with absurdly phrased sentences.
The Post, the New York Times, and other outlets insisted on describing the inflation rate as “stubbornly high.” The Times explained inflation had “moderated less than anticipated”—bad news for Democrats is perennially unexpected—while lamenting that a “sustainable inflation slowdown … remains elusive.” This was “bad news for the Federal Reserve” and “unwelcome news for the White House.” For consumers as well, presumably.
Television journalists, meanwhile, deployed their genius-level intellects to argue that 8.3 percent inflation was actually “good news” for normal Americans. “We’re seeing cooling all around in terms of inflation,” said CNN correspondent Christine Romans, who went on to note that Americans should be “glad to see” that year-on-year inflation was 0.2 percentage points lower in August than it was in July, which signalled a positive “trend.”
As these well-dressed pundits were telling Americans that high inflation wasn’t a big deal, the U.S. stock market was having its worst day since June 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies threw a party at the White House to celebrate the passage of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, a bill most experts do not believe will actually reduce inflation anytime soon, if at all. Hippie songwriter James Taylor played “Fire and Rain.”
More than a year has passed since Biden stood in the White House and confidently told reporters he had inflation under control. “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way—no serious economist,” Biden said in July 2021. “I mean, look, the stock market is higher than it has been in all of history.”
Since then, the S&P 500 index has declined by more than 10 per cent.
