Um, Seriait, there's a reason I asked for one or two, as I can't vet all that. It'd take me weeks or months to investigate each of those arenas to my satisfaction to be able to tell you 'authoritatively' whether I think your invididual points have merit.
I don't think you should go point by point. Instead, pick an agency that you've heard of and do some investigation about what policies and procedures they've changed since Biden took over and consider the impact they've had. Some like those involved in border enforcement have had dramatic policy shifts on hundreds of individual rules and actions, but have less to do with the economy than with politics, others like the DoL are a mixed economic/policy puzzle, others like those dealing with COVID relief have issued policies of massive economic disruption sometimes justifiable but sometimes with barely a fig leaf for respecting their authority. I went with the EPA first because of how extreme their rule was and how much of an impact even pre-compliance has directly had on energy costs.
But are you seriously meaning to say that instances of systemic money shifting in the form of legal settlements and voter registration activities are why bread in stores would go up 50% in cost over the last two years?
Lol. The change in settlement practice is going forward, and the change in agency directives to spend time on voter registration is against a backdrop where the Biden admin has used the defense in court that they can not comply with the law because the agency is underfunded (in their defense of catch and release) and where that's been a frequent refrain calling for additional funds for agencies (e.g., its' also been used to argue for expansion of the IRS's budget).
But the answer, long and short, in respect of any one specific item, such as the price of bread, is yes they contribute, but not in such a direct and clear and material way that it's obvious. That's exactly why I listed (off the top of my head) so many things, the Biden (and before him Obama) "whole of government" approach is deliberately designed implementation of the death by a thousand cuts strategy. The administrative agencies can promulgated thousands of rules, change millions of enforcement decisions and undermine the intent of law on hundreds of millions of interactions with the government, every one of which has an economic impact (not all bad), but the fighting of which imposes
grossly disproportionate costs on industry, companies and individuals.
And then they can point to any one thing (the only way to fight in court is generally little thing by little thing) and say honestly that this tiny thing isn't responsible for everything bad.
So yes, Biden is directly responsible for that. He's literally made no secret about it. He's trumpeted his overturning of Trump era policies that were designed to control these costs, he's announced publicly his plan to "reverse" Supreme Court decisions or act when Congress won't through abuse of regulatory process and he's openly directed the agencies to search through their implementing statutes to "find" new ways to achieve
political results.
The fact that Democrats have embedded something like 95% Democratic partisans into those agencies and made "worker protection" laws making it impossible to remove them, means that we have a permanent and non-accountable Democrat controlled administrative law.
And likewise these things are the cause of the stock market soaring starting Aug 2021...
Inflation caused some of this, but mostly this was the post-pandemic boost that Dems planned on covering their bad policies and that somehow Biden managed to undermine.
...of the high price of crude oil coming into 2022
Direct Biden policies caused that and are still causing that. Anyone with any exposure to the oil industry can walk you through a thousand regulatory changes and actions that have caused it to be grossly unwise to invest in new oil and pipeline capacity. It's not obvious from the outside, but pipelines have to be constantly invested in to maintain a steady capacity. Not for repairs, literally they have to be constantly being constructed to adjust to the development of new wells. Without constant investment you create a situation where no one can drill or extract profitably. Biden has deliberately undermined every part of the oil extraction process, they've refused to sell leases (despite being required by law), they've refused to renew (wasting massive previous investments), they've openly told the industry not to invest because they're going to close them down.
If we had a real media, you'd already know this.
I'll focus on two of your points that I see as being more directly related to soaring inflation. Even if some of your other points have merit as being administrative bloat or mismanagement, that happens now and then in policits but doesn't generate 9%+ inflation.
Actually it does. Inflation is a combination of everything.
Or how about the express new directives in the housing industry that they have to consider "equity" in mortgages going forward? Do you remember the whole friggin' sub-prime crisis? This is literally the same type of action that underpinned the entire subprime mortgage crisis. It's directly adding to the costs of housing, as the every loan made that isn't justified by the actual financials increases the incurrence of losses that have be made up through the rates on everyone else.
Can you be more explicit about which directives you mean? I do read and hear a lot about the mortgage market, so I'd like to know which policies you mean and where they're coming from so I can see if we're seeing the same thing.
There are a whole series of changes and directives on this. Here's the White House's own "only the good" announcement of the grand plan. Note the sheer number of agencies involved and the "redirection" of funds appropriated for things like COVID relief to force changes in zoning laws to allow high density buildings to be built any where.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/05/16/president-biden-announces-new-actions-to-ease-the-burden-of-housing-costs/When you really get down to it, they've already announced things like race based mortgage guarantees, and payment relief (i.e., favored races will get handed federal down payments and the federal government will forgive mortgage defaults) and a return to approval of mortgages without evidence of an ability to repay (why's that needed if the government is going to pay for it?).
Or how about the changes to the minimum wage?
Well, how about it? This is the prices of commodities and finished goods are going up? Even for commodities and raw materials not exctracted in the U.S.? Even from countries which have had no change in their minimum wage lately?
How quaint, you think that the only labor inputs in an international market are those of the foreign workers. What about the shippers, the transhippers, the port authorities, the truckers, the stockers, the workers at the store? What about the workers that service all those people and whose wages they have to pay? Not to mention the higher taxes owed on the additional dollars made - even though real wages declined - the numbers move people up in the tax brackets.
As a side point, perhaps tangential to the issue of inflation, people have become very fed up during the pandemic at working crap jobs for crap money, and to the extent that the 'great resignation' is a real thing, an increase in the minimum wage would be just the government doing by fiat what sensible businesses do on their own if they actually want to retain staff.
Nope. If "sensible businesses" would do it, it would have already happened. In fact, most people made far more than minimum wage directly because of that reality. What the government did is "close the gap" devaluing the work of everyone whose work was more valuable than the minimum wage by pretending the minimum wage work has more value than it does. The second big impact that this had (in addition to inflation destroying a chunk of the value of the change) is caused a direct reduction in worker hours - even of those above minimum wage. That's magnified the real wages loss. It was just in the WSJ today (granted in an opinion piece but easily verifiable) that real wages have declined in 10 out of the last 13 months of the Biden Admin and they've now fallen more during Biden's Presidency than during the recession from the financial crisis. Compare to Trump where he set several records for growth in real wages (at least pre-pandemic).
I've been to grossly understaffed restaurants during the pandemic, with employees there griping about "no one wants to work" and blaming it on a paltry few covid relief payments. It's much more likely those payments gave people the breathing space (per the UBI argument) to be able to leave the job they didn't want to be at, but that 'not wanting to work' had to do with the conditions at that job.
"Grossly more likely" based on what? Your feelings or opinion? Why express either, the stats are out there. Even though we added millions of working age workers during the pandemic on a net basis, and we still haven't broken even on jobs from before the pandemic, and we still have massive help wanted problems, and yet somehow unemployment rate is low? The stats are there and they're obvious, the difference is not that people left poor jobs for better, they left to not have jobs or they never even started looking for jobs. Labor force participation is way down, in fact its so far down it's at a level that hasn't been seen since the late 70's. And that's ALL on Biden, he's lost a full point on the participation rate since he took office. Jan and Feb 2020 the rate stayed stable from where Trump had gotten it (Trump had it trending up to 63.4%). Dems passed the party-line America Rescue Act (i.e. the pretend COVID relief law) on March 10th. By April labor force participation dropped to 60.2%. It's currently at 62.2% (over a full point off of where Biden inherited it, and again last seen in the 70s).
When you look at all of that together, that's a tremendous amount of people that are no longer looking for work.
I'll note that Costco for instance has a reputation for paying well and having happy employees. I suppose this practice, which they undertook of their own volition, is responsible for 9.1% inflation as well?
In the aggregate yes, though Costco's wages being at a premium in a stable market have little effect. Where the government has an intentional inflationary (like we do) or deflationary strategy, then the deltas caused by wage premiums have a bigger effect. But at the end of the day, most of the commercial effects of a business decision are a wash. If Costco pays too much it has to charge too much.
Governmental fiats on the other hand distort the process and has a massive effect. Before you even think about arguing the point, remember that if it isn't true, then there is no reasonable reason to engage them. Fiats are an intentional and knowing action taken specifically to distort the market because the government has decided as a matter of policy that a distortion is required.
Declaring that all jobs should be paid a living wage, for example, means anyone working at the bottom end of the wage scale is priced out of many services. How can someone barely able to support their own family pay their baby sitter enough to support the baby sitters family? They can't. Instead, today we pay people who don't need a living wage to baby sit. Government fiats help neither of those persons as they eliminate the ability to get a baby sitter (possibly eliminating the parents ability to hold a job) and eliminate the baby sitters ability to earn some money doing a job they found convenient.
And the knock-on-effects from that are hugely punitive to the poor. Once again, a promise that sounds good - I'm going to make your boss pay you more - actually harms the very people who think they're going to benefit.
UBI is just communism. There is no money to hand out that isn't stolen from some one else. Literally transferring from the productive to the unproductive solely for the purpose of generating governmental power.
