In order to explain away inflation as being brought on or made worse by something other than their own actions and policy choices, President Joe Biden and his administration have created a variety of scapegoats and justifications.
According to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, the millions of Americans who choose not to receive the COVID-19 vaccine are the newest scapegoats for inflation.
Meanwhile, Powell seemed to simultaneously and accidentally admit incompetence and lack of vision by acknowledging that none of the Fed’s economic models foresaw the inflation that was obvious and predictable to everyone else. Powell also spread the blame for inflation to the still-existing supply-chain bottlenecks, which the Biden administration claimed to have fixed, as well as the main fallback excuse of the past few months, Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The @federalreserve’s Powell blames Americans not getting sufficiently vaccinated for his inflation crisis. pic.twitter.com/GmdJjrn2Hf
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 29, 2022
“What did we get wrong? And that really was looking at these supply-side issues and believing that they would be resolved relatively quickly,” Chairman Powell responded when asked if there was one thing he wished he had known sooner that could have reduced inflation.
He further said, “By that I mean there were gonna be vaccinations — everyone would get vaccinated — so the millions of people who dropped out of the labor force would come right back in, so wages wouldn’t be under such pressure. That didn’t happen.”
Price inflation hasn’t typically been blamed on unvaccinated Americans over the past 18 months, at least not until now. They are merely the latest target to which the Biden administration has shifted the blame in order to escape accountability for the reckless spending and short-sighted policies that overheated and destroyed an economy that was recovering on its own when Biden first took office.
The Fed printing trillions of dollars out of thin air, Congress injecting that cash into the economy, and the Biden administration’s anti-domestic energy policies are arguably the biggest drivers of inflation — not unvaccinated Americans, many of whom continued to work throughout the pandemic, at least in states where misguided government policies did not forbid them from doing so.
