Have You Gone to the Store Lately?

            Groceries continue to cost more each week and are noticed by every shopper. I spent more than $100 today and came home with one bag of groceries. I bought airline tickets a couple of days ago and paid nearly twice as much as tickets I purchased three months ago. Inflation is eating up lots of money.

            According to Daren Bakst, the “8.8% year-over-year increase (March 2022 compared with March 2021) is the largest in more than 40 years.”  In lived through the last inflation cycle and remember how difficult it was to provide food for a growing family with the value of my money quickly decreasing. I have much compassion for young families striving to stretch their food dollars. 

            It goes without saying that the federal government needs to stop spending money, particularly paying people to stay home from work. However, one of the greatest ways to help Americans fight this inflation is for Biden to stop his war on energy. Bakst shared the following information.

The latest year-over-year data shows that energy prices rose 32%. This isn’t an anomaly, as the year-over-year increases for each of the past six months have been greater than 25%. Energy is an input that affects sectors across the economy, including the food sector. For example, high energy prices drive up the costs to farmers for a key agricultural input, namely fertilizer. More than 57% of fertilizer used in the United States are nitrogenous fertilizers, and a critical input for nitrogenous fertilizers is natural gas, which can account for 70% to 90% of its manufacturing cost.

Removing harmful energy interventions would help relieve some of the price pressure. For example, the Biden administration should end restrictions on the extraction and use of natural gas, including allowing the leasing of federal land and the Outer Continental Shelf for natural gas exploration and production.

It should also withdraw its new National Environmental Policy Act final rule that guts the Trump administration’s commonsense changes to expedite the development of energy and infrastructure projects.

            Bakst had other ideas for how Biden could bring the cost of energy down, but I do not expect the Biden administration to pay any attention to them. They do not have a history of showing any willingness or skills in making life better for Americans. In just over a year, Biden has taken a good economy down to the lowest level in decades. All the economic gains made during the Trump administration have been lost under Biden. Can America survive nearly three more years of this disastrous presidency?