CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – The spinning of the State of the Union was impressive. It takes a true wordsmith to make it seem as if these are good times in the United States. We know the truth every time we fuel up our cars or go shopping for groceries.
Joe Biden told us that gas prices are lower now than when Russia invaded Ukraine. Which begs a question. We were told that rising gas prices were the “Putin tax hike”. If so, please explain what Vladimir Putin has done to bring prices down? And those of us with good memories know that gas was $2.53 a gallon when Donald Trump left office. We know that Joe Biden’s inflation was pushing fuel prices upward before the war in Ukraine.
We also know the truth about food prices. Grocery inflation was 9.9-percent last year. And while it is no longer rising as sharply, prices have not come down. Polling suggests 40 to 45-percent of Americans acknowledge they’re worse off since Biden took office.
Democrats have long said that Joe Biden needs to take more credit for the policies he got through Congress. There are three: A massive COVID stimulus package, which included a third round of stimulus payments to citizens. Giving money to people who haven’t earned it has been the number one driver of inflation. Thankfully, there will be no more of that now that control of the House has flipped. There was a bipartisan infrastructure bill. But I recall that three years earlier, Donald Trump also wanted to do a large infrastructure package. It was filibustered and killed by democrats in the U.S. Senate. Apparently job-creating public works projects only became a good idea when Joe Biden came into office. It begs the question how many of these projects could have already been underway if we acted earlier. And lastly there’s the $1.7-trillion omnibus bill, larded up with pork and put in the trough for lame-duck members of Congress to pass. Now Biden has the audacity to suggest that all this new spending be part of the baseline for future budgets. That should be an obvious line in the sand for debt ceiling talks: the pork gets rolled back before we take on any new debt.
And, of course, Joe Biden took a victory lap on COVID. He defeated the biggest health crisis of a generation. But he left out that COVID-related spending will continue for another three months until May. The crisis has been a tremendous vehicle to spend money.
President Biden will take his day-after tour of the country to Wisconsin today. His liberal Madison friends certainly like him better than the last occupant of the White House. But not one of them can say they’re better off today than they were two years ago. But those who were cheering last night’s State of the Union address have already mastered self delusion.
Chris Conley
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