Millennium’s Dumbest Headline: ‘Few Tools to Fix Inflation’

The world is barely 23 years into the Third Millennium, anno domini (which started Jan. 1, 2001, and don’t argue). 

Yet the Wall Street Journal’s April 12 print edition may already have set the standard for dumbest headline for the entire 1,000 years: “Biden Has Few Tools to Fix Inflation.”

Incredulous at an assertion that was 11 days late to be an April Fool’s joke, this commentator went on to read the attached article’s lede. 

“(I)ntractable domestic policy issue.” “(I)sn’t a whole lot the White House can do to fix it.”

Surely just the misguided opinion of some cub reporter at the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper, magnified by a bored headline writer. 

Au contraire! The piece quotes unnamed “administration officials” that “there was no magic bullet to slow rising prices immediately.”

This wildly underqualified scribe must therefore educate the literally brain-dead president’s economic team – led by the dimmest Treasury secretary in history, who actually thinks snuffing out the next generation of workers and innovators is a growth strategy.

Based on day-one learnings from his senior-year introductory economics-for-dummies course at the estimable University of Michigan, this correspondent can reliably inform the bewildered Bidenites and Journal’s ostensible journalists that the necessary “tools to fix inflation” number exactly two.

Spelled out slowly to afford both parties the slim hope of keeping up:

1. S-U-P-P-L-Y. 

And 

2. D-E-M-A-N-D.

Moreover, the presence of two examples of the principle could be found in the self-same edition. Move a few inches north and voila! a report headlined “Cost of Owning a Home Soars.”

In 2023, it seems, “mortgage rates reached a 23-year high and home prices set new records.” “(O)ther prices related to homeownership keep rising and show little signs of abating,” including “property taxes, maintenance, utilities and insurance.”

Let’s knock these down one at a time, shall we? 

The mortgage rate surge traces to a simple fact” inflation is a currency-supply imbalance. You’ve all heard the Milton Friedman aphorisms:

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon … caused by too much money [oversupply] chasing after too few goods [undersupply].”

Where did the “too much money” come from? Stomping on the accelerator instead of the brakes as the economy soared back from the mini-depression induced by the government’s panicked pandemic overresponse.

As this pundit last year catalogued the Uniparty’s spending drag race: “its $1.9 trillion American ‘Rescue’ spendapalooza, its $1.2 trillion infrastructure hog trough, its $200 billion semiconductor industry boondoggle, its $1.7 trillion Green New Deal-not-so-lite ‘Inflation Reduction’ hornswoggle, and the $1.9 trillion everything-including-the-kitchen-sink (but not gas stove) omnibus(t).” Now add last month’s $1.2 trillion continuing resolution. 

Mortgage rates have followed interest rates which the Federal Reserve had to raise – and is having to keep elevated – in a vain attempt to sop up all these excess dollars. 

How about record home prices? 

Last year Bank of America, supported by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and the National Association of Home Builders, reported “unprecedented” homebuilding cost rises. Why? Undersupply of at least 1.5 million housing units caused by jumps in prices of land, labor, and building materials. All driven by inflation washing itself through the system along with ongoing shortages (undersupply) of materials, such as transformers and concrete.

Why such high demand for housing? Might part of it be another oversupply problem: the uncontrolled surge of who-knows-how-many migrants, who have to live somewhere? Real and armchair experts – backed by past studies – have advanced the sensible notion that, as Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, has put it, “We cannot … absorb 10 million people and still provide high-quality housing to the rest of our citizens. The math doesn’t work … The increase in housing prices and rents is clear for all to see.”

Back to the Journal article and another rising cost – wait for it: “demand for home maintenance services continues to outpace the supply … there aren’t enough professionals to serve all these homeowners.”

An undersupply of workers that’s also contributing to homebuilding and materials shortfalls? Might that relate somehow to government policies paying people not to work? 

Given that most of these jobs are filled by men, might it specifically link to males leaving the workforce for decades, due to crashing college attainment – women students now outnumber men 60%-40% – declines in real wages, and plummeting marriage and family formation, once the main reason men worked? All attributable to misincentives from Uncle Sam?

Don’t forget quantum leaps in insurance, again partly from higher building replacement costs. Yet also attributed to more homes in disaster-prone areas, a direct result of government subsidies creating “moral hazard” – artificial demand to live in such areas.

A second premier example of Democrat-driven supply-demand imbalances popped up on the back pages of the same Journal edition in an editorial headlined – appropriately in this case – “Biden’s Green Energy Price Shock.” It turns out the unprecedented spending that is driving dollar oversupply is also leading to energy undersupply.

Notes the Journal, “By driving more baseload power plants” – fossil fuel and nuclear – “out of business, IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) subsidies will increase electric bills even more” than the 29.4% they’ve already risen under President Brandon. Seems his advisers missed the “tool” of simply allowing the massive increase in American oil and gas production that emerged during the Trump years to continue.

Not noted in the Journal but once championed there is The Gipper’s strategy – “supply-side”-oriented tax reform – which tamed the Carter double-digit surges and drove non-inflationary job growth pre-pandemic with The Donald’s magnificent achievement, dramatic decreasing the corporate tax rate. Mr. Biden’s response? Pure “voodoo economics”: sneak a corporate minimum tax into the IRA and push now to hike it along with the base corporate rate.

The supply-demand “tools to fix inflation” are clear: Ditch green and all subsidies. Slash other overspending. Restore fossil-fuel production. Incentivize supply-boosting productivity and work through further tax reform. Control the border. Promote family and business formation and get men back into the workforce.

Oh, wait. All that would require a “tool” the “tools” in this White House, and the Journal’s non-editorial writers, equally clearly lack: common sense.

Bob Maistros is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.