The position of Chief of Staff to the President of the United States is a pretty important position. Some who have held that title have been better known than others. Some notable names: James Baker served both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Leon Panetta served Bill Clinton, Rahm Emanuel served Barack Obama, and Mark Meadows among others served Donald Trump.
Joe Biden‘s Chief of Staff is a fellow by the name of Ron Klain. I’m sure he’s a smart guy – you don’t rise to be Chief of Staff to the leader of the free world unless you’ve got something on the ball. But Mr. Klain said something really stupid last week. He apparently believes that inflation and skyrocketing price increases are just “high class problems.”
Tell that to the middle class family struggling to pay a dollar-and-a-half more per gallon at the pump this year over last year. Tell that to folks who are trying to put food on the table for their kids. Or tell that to anyone fortunate enough to be able to afford to build a new home, and discovers that lumber has gone up more than 300% over the last year!
So even though Biden‘s Chief of Staff apparently now thinks that inflation is just a rich peoples’ problem and doesn’t affect middle-class folks, he was singing a different tune about inflation when Donald Trump was president. Back in 2017, during the first year of the Trump presidency, Klain said “will he {Trump} hold up a Campbell’s Soup can and argue that price increases for basic food items don’t really hurt the middle class?” It’s interesting to note that inflation under Biden is currently twice as high as it was during the Trump administration. There’s a word for Klain’s comment – hypocrisy.
Under Biden, we now have the highest inflation rate in the past 13 years – 5.4%. Lots of middle-class folks get hurt by this, despite Klain’s claim that it’s just the rich’s problem. Just think how senior citizens on fixed income are being affected, especially those at moderate and low-income levels. For example, many seniors depend on their Social Security check, and money they may have tucked away in a bank savings account or CD, that are probably returning well below 1% interest per year. With inflation at 5.4%, and likely to head up from there, many seniors are hurting.
And why are we seeing higher inflation in the first place? It’s my opinion that the trillions and trillions of dollars that Biden and Democrats in Congress have spent since taking total control of the government, is principally at fault. For example, the nearly $2 trillion so-called COVID Relief Bill that Democrats passed back in March spent only 9% on actual COVID relief. The rest was just more spending of your money on whatever Democrats wanted, because they think they know how to spend your money better than you do. So when you have lots of free money chasing too few goods and services, prices go up, and we have inflation. If the socialist Democrats are successful in cramming their $5 to $6 trillion social infrastructure bill through this fall, it will make inflation even worse.
So if you believe that inflation is just a problem for the rich, Ron Klain probably has a bridge he’d like to sell you. And it’s not the Brent Spence.