You can’t fix inflation by regulating price controls. Jimmy Carter tried that and it failed.
Economist for President Trump, Stephen Moore, drafted a response to the Biden economy this week at the New York Post.
The obvious solution to $5-a-gallon gas, surging prices at the grocery store and higher drug and hospital costs is to stop the multitrillions of dollars of debt-spending in Washington that is dumping cheap money into the economy.
When President Donald Trump left office 15 months ago, inflation was less than 2%. It is now somewhere between 7% and 10%, depending on the measure. And Biden-flation isn’t “transitory.” If anything, the up escalator on prices is getting worse.
Now the Biden administration complains that producers are taking advantage of product shortages and supply-chain constraints by jacking up their prices. He wants to penalize the meat packers for the high beef prices, the poultry industry for the rising expense of a chicken dinner, the drug companies for the high cost of pharmaceuticals and the oil and gas industry for recording record profits while gas prices soar.
He wants the Federal Trade Commission and other regulatory agencies to impose price ceilings to be monitored by an army of federal price-control police.
This is economic amnesia. We tried all these government manipulations in the 1960s and 1970s. The ruinous price regulations on industry made inflation worse. Back then we had Soviet-style central planners imposing price limits on everything: long-distance phone calls, oil and gas, airlines, rail service, trucking and banking services.
This was supposed to protect consumers, but by making it illegal for prices to rise, we got hit with empty shelves, shortages and gas lines.
The price ceilings became de facto price floors. Inflation shot up from 5% to 8% to 10% by 1980.
Even Democrats Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy realized that things were going haywire. They took the lead in ushering in an era of decontrol of prices. And when President Ronald Reagan was elected, his first executive order was to end oil and gas price controls.
One of the first things Reagan did in office was to eliminate price controls on oil. This led to lower prices and a freer economy.
Reagan removed price controls on oil via an executive order issued shortly after his inauguration, the price fell almost immediately and kept dropping so that by the first year of his second term average gas prices were below 90 cents a gallon.
Thanks to Reagan showing the way, it would be many years before rising gas prices would become a problem for Americans, with many gas stations still selling regular for well under 90 cents even in the late 1990s. Somehow the nation’s greedy oil companies were found to be uninterested in gouging consumers when they would have little noticed.
Reagan was for the American people, as was President Trump, but it appears that no one in the Biden Administration is for America. Not a single move has been for the good of the nation. Now the Biden gang is working to continue to harm the economy. There’s no stopping how bad this economy will be in a couple of years. Biden/Obama have single-handedly destroyed this nation. They aren’t going to stop now.
