I have only praised Joe Biden once since him becoming president.  That was for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. Of course, even with that, he (or his administration) managed to botch the operation of withdrawal.

Also, I think Biden was boxed in on the Afghanistan issue.  Trump had made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw in 2021.  The only two choices were to withdraw or face major violence.  Not withdrawing would have ultimately led to a major surge in troops and probably a much bigger disaster than what we saw.

Biden has been a complete disaster in every other way.  The worst thing he has done is imposing vaccine mandates.  But his whole administration is either incompetent or evil.  It is more corrupt and evil than incompetent, but there are elements of both.

At the same time, I don’t want to blame Biden or his administration for things that aren’t problems or aren’t his fault.  I cringe when I hear conservatives bashing Biden for being soft on China.  I don’t know what this means other than they think Biden should provoke war.

I mean, if Biden is doing corrupt deals with the Chinese government, then say this.  But I wouldn’t characterize that as being soft on China.

One of the latest things where conservatives are bashing Biden is on the topic of inflation.  When most people refer to inflation, they are talking about rising prices.  They aren’t talking about the Austrian school of economics use of the term to refer to an increase in the money supply.

So now we get to hear the term “Bidenflation”.  This is referring to the higher price inflation that most Americans are experiencing.

So is it fair to blame Biden for the price inflation that is running higher?  We aren’t quite at the levels of the 1970s yet, but we are getting a lot closer to double digit annual price inflation, even by the government’s own metrics.

A Nuanced Explanation

Ultimately, it is the Federal Reserve (the Fed) responsible for the price inflation, because it is the Fed that is responsible for the monetary inflation that makes the price inflation possible.  When the central bank more than doubles its balance sheet in a period of less than 2 years, it is not surprising when prices start increasing at a faster pace.  It may only be surprising in the sense that this didn’t happen after the Fed’s monetary inflation after the financial crisis in 2008.

If we blame the Fed though, we ultimately also have to blame Congress and the president.  Congress authorized the existence of the Fed as a monopolist central bank.  If the willpower was there, Congress could get rid of the Fed, or at least its monopoly power of controlling the money supply and setting short-term interest rates.  At the same time, let’s remember that the president nominates the Fed chair, which is then approved by the Senate.

Of course, there is no talk of repealing the Fed or even scaling back its power.  So in this sense, Biden is only responsible to the degree that every other president since 1913 has been responsible.

I do think Biden is more directly responsible in the sense that he and his handlers are promoting massive federal spending.  He is pushing these multi-trillion dollar bills on top of the already bloated budget.  We would have massive deficits without these additional spending bills.  Biden also pushed these expanded child tax credits so that he could get credit for sending tens of millions of checks to families.

(I encourage tax cuts, but these are child tax credits, which means that even some people who pay little or no federal income tax will receive money.  Also, since no spending is being cut, it is just rearranging who gets the money.)

To be sure, Donald Trump did the same thing.  If Trump were still in office, I believe that price inflation would be almost just as bad.  Maybe we wouldn’t have had these additional spending bills coming through, but the overall trend would be the same.

The stimulus checks started under Trump.   The massive lockdown bailouts happened under Trump.  The deficit exploded in 2020 when Trump was president.  I don’t think this would have reversed had Trump stayed in office.  Also, when Trump criticized Jerome Powell (Trump’s pick for Fed chair), it was because he wasn’t being loose enough with monetary policy.

Still, Biden is president now, and he is pushing the massive spending that is happening now.  This spending is inflationary because it is all deficit spending.  The money has to come from somewhere.  Either the debt is bought up by the Fed (through money creation), or it is bought up by other parties that could drive interest rates up.

The Fed has said it is now tapering, meaning it will create a little less new money than it had been doing before.  But if interest rates go up because other parties have to buy up some of the debt, then it is hard to imagine the Fed not stepping in and increasing its purchases (i.e., money creation).

So I think Joe Biden is partially responsible for the high price inflation that we are currently seeing.  I am glad that many Americans are blaming Biden just because he is such a destructive president.

At that same time, it is important to understand why Biden is partially at fault and that the Fed is the party that is actually creating the inflation.  If people don’t grasp this, then we will see more economic destruction in the future, with or without Biden as president.