Biden’s Inflation

This is what Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s proudly touted Bidenomics has inflicted on us: continued high inflation.

Tacitly, Biden knows his policies are a failure, but he won’t admit it.

For now, officials said, Biden and his senior aides aren’t planning any major policy or rhetorical shifts.

Yet,

Behind the scenes, administration officials said there was no magic bullet to slow rising prices immediately, an issue that has dogged the president for years.

Rising prices—inflation—has been Biden’s problem since he took office; that’s the time frame of that drily put “for years.” From the Biden-caused sharp increase that damaged so many millions of pocketbooks of us ordinary Americans through that partial fall in inflation, of which Biden is so, and so misleadingly, proud, to the last few months of steadier 3+% inflation, we’re still facing price levels increasing at much higher rates than before Biden began his reign.

Some of Biden’s cost-cutting plans will take months to come to fruition and will do little in the short term to slow the rate of price increases.

[T]ake months to come to fruition: yeah—they’ve taken three years and counting.

Some stubbornly high prices, such as the cost of groceries, are mostly out of the Biden administration’s control.

Here, the news personalities who wrote the article at the link are badly mistaken. ­All of those high prices are fully under the administration’s control. Begin with Biden’s war of destruction on our energy industry. Energy underlies every aspect of our economy: fuel for our personal vehicles, energy to heat our homes in winter and cool them in summer, fuel for generating the electricity that’s needed in every aspect of our personal and business lives, shipping costs for all of our goods and services—including shipment of our groceries—and on and on. By seeking to destroy our coal-, oil-, and natural gas-based energy production, and continuing to passively block development and construction of nuclear power plants, Biden is raising the prices of energy, and that alone raises the price of every single item in our economy. Including those groceries.

Most economists don’t believe Biden can do much at this point to bring down inflation, absent major tax increases or spending cuts that could curtail consumer spending. Even those policies, which aren’t being seriously considered in Washington, would take time to work their way through the economy.

Most economists are right as far as they go. And they’re wrong. Tax increases or government spending cuts would take time to have effect. However, tax increases would reduce economic activity in general by taking even more money out of our private economy than our usurious current tax code does. That reduced economic activity will only lead to continued, if not increased, government spending in the form of welfare handouts, and those lead to greater deficits and debt, and to increased dependence on government.

Government spending cuts won’t, though, lead to less consumer spending. On the contrary, with less government competition for the same goods and services our private economy needs, inflation—and real price levels—would come down, making it easier for us consumers to consume, not harder.

But most economists don’t go far enough. There is much the Biden administration—Biden himself as President—can do that would have more immediate favorable effects on price levels. He can remove his Executive Orders that are interfering with the free flow of goods and services and that inhibit coal, oil, and natural gas production. He can instruct his Departments and Agencies to withdraw their rules that interfere with that free flow and that inhibit energy production.

But he won’t.

Housing and Inflation

There is some concern that inflation won’t abate further until housing inflation, especially rent inflation, abates further. This graph, though, suggests that there’s more to overall inflation’s stubbornness than just rent, or housing in general, inflation.

The CPI being largely flat the last few months, despite rapidly falling housing inflation, suggests a lack of importance of housing to overall inflation relative to other factors at current levels of both. Food inflation, reflecting what we actually buy rather than the government’s idealized and mythical sack of groceries, and fuel inflation, and energy inflation seem more significant factors.

Some DoD Acquisition Problems

Our DoD’s failure with battlefield drones (as opposed to large surveillance and targeted raid drones) is shamefully demonstrated by a small US drone builder and Ukraine’s position on and need for actual, small, battle-capable drones.

Most small drones from US startups have failed to perform in combat, dashing companies’ hopes that a badge of being battle-tested would bring the startups sales and attention. It is also bad news for the Pentagon, which needs a reliable supply of thousands of small, unmanned aircraft.

One aspect of the American problem stems from too much dependence on DoD specifications.

American drone company executives say they didn’t anticipate the electronic warfare in Ukraine. In Skydio‘s [a Silicon Valley company] case, its drone was designed in 2019 to meet communications standards set by the US military.

How is it possible that our own military establishment, with its battlefield experience, has so badly misunderstood battlefield communications threats, counters, and needs? One reason—not the only one, since military officers are capable of learning from the past and anticipating the future—is that our military establishment hasn’t any current battlefield experience, only experience at fighting terrorist organizations. Even as recently as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military didn’t face a qualified army, for all its formal army-like structure.

There’s this, too, particularly related to acquisition, although here applied specifically to drone acquisition:

Several startup executives said US restrictions on drone parts and testing limit what they can build and how fast they can build it.
Those restrictions have proven a problem in the drone battles that sometimes require daily updates and upgrades, said Georgii Dubynskyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, the agency that oversees the country’s drone program.
“What is flying today won’t be able to fly tomorrow,” he said. “We have to adapt to the emerging technologies quickly. The innovation cycle in this war is very short.”

But the bureaucrats don’t care. They only care about their personal imperatives. One result of this bureaucratic interference and failure:

Ukrainian officials have found US-made drones fragile and unable to overcome Russian jamming and GPS blackout technology. … American drones often fail to fly at the distances advertised or carry substantial payloads.

There’s that communications failure again, along with a general failure to perform.

Skydio is showing the way [emphasis added]:

Skydio employees went back to Ukraine 17 times to get feedback, Bry said. Its new drone is built around Ukraine’s military needs and feedback from public-safety agencies and other customers, he said, rather than US Defense Department requirements that are sometimes divorced from battlefield realities.

None of our DoD acquisitors have done that. That’s as much on SecDef Lloyd Austin and CJCS General Charles Brown, Jr (and General Mark Milley before him) as it is on the acquisitors, though.

Skydio‘s growing success from its more independent development process is illustrated here:

Ukraine has requested thousands of the new Skydio X10, which has a radio that can switch frequencies on its own as soon as its signal is jammed by electronic interference. It also has better navigation capabilities so it can fly at high altitudes without GPS, Skydio said.
“It is critical for Skydio, and I think the US drone industry at large, that we make X10 succeed at scale on the battlefield in Ukraine,” Bry said. “There’s no alternative. As a country, we can’t miss on this.”

These problems—and they aren’t the only ones, they’re just a few exposed by DoD drone incompetence—will prove fatal in American battles, and so damaging if not fatal to American national security—independence.

We badly need to clean house in the DoD, following that with a removal of the civilian bureaucrat contingent in DoD acquisition (returning them to the private economy, rather than reassignment withing the Federal government), and we badly need to elect a President and Congress with the national security awareness and political courage to do so.

Again, I Ask

The subheadline of a Wall Street Journal editorial concerning Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s pushing Ukraine to stop hitting inside Russia, particularly Russia’s oil refineries, says it al.

The White House fears attacks on refineries inside Russia could raise global prices.

In the body of the editorial:

…the Biden Administration had urged Ukraine to halt its campaign targeting Russian refineries and warned that “the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation.”

That’s Biden’s tacit admission of two things: the currently in place oil sanctions against Russia aren’t working—else Ukraine’s successes would severely impact Putin’s ability to get fuel to his barbarians inside Ukraine, which we should be able to expect even Biden to consider good, but those successes would have no effect on oil prices outside Russia.

The other Biden admission is that he doesn’t want the sanctions to work.

Again I ask: whose side is Biden on?

Market Imperatives

Ford has said that it will delay the rollout of its wholly battery-powered three-row electric vehicles, its new model SUVs, from 2025 to 2027. That’s not because of development or production problems, either.

The additional time will allow for the consumer market for three-row EVs to further develop and enable Ford to take advantage of emerging battery technology, with the goal to provide customers increased durability and better value.

“Allowing the consumer market to develop further”—in other words, consumers don’t want these battery SUVs, and Ford isn’t intent on producing and not selling them, until customers actually want them. Which they don’t, never minding Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s æther-borne claim to the contrary.

Those silly consumers—they just don’t know what’s good for them.