Biden’s got no quick fix tilting at windmill power instead of US oil

If Sleepy Joe Biden just didn’t trip over every other word, he could be much more effective in his divisiveness.

That was the assessment after our president’s latest tone deaf, erratic, often nasty and definitely embarrassing display of economic ineptitude from a group of Wall Street execs I often lean on to gauge the pulse of what the financial sector is thinking.

Some of them voted for Biden; none of them could be characterized as MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporters. But all were in agreement that Biden’s speech Tuesday on inflation, and how he plans to fight it, was odd on so many levels — including but not limited to the bumbling presentation.

A few of them were even yearning for the good old days when The Donald was in the White House. Yeah, they hated Trump’s mean tweets and petty feuds with people who crossed him (either real or imagined). But at least he kept things interesting and at bottom his economic policies were fairly competent.

You really can’t say that about Biden. The most memorable thing about his speech aside from its halting delivery was that he blamed everyone for raging inflation but his own inflationary policies. Most to blame, according to Biden, is Vladimir Putin and his invasion of the Ukraine, which is adding to inflationary pressures because of the sanctions against Russia, a major energy manufacturer, is roiling the oil markets.

But those inflationary pressures were apparent long before the war. The White House’s green-energy policies began depressing oil supply and squeezing consumers at the pump just as the new administration went on a spending spree that goosed consumer demand for every commodity including food and gasoline.

Recall the words of Larry Summers, the Obama-Clinton economist. Summers, hardly part of the MAGA crowd, predicted long before the Ukraine conflict that the blow-out spending Biden pushed through a Democratic-controlled Congress would spark ’70s style price increases.

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