When President Joe Biden canceled the Keystone Pipeline and ended the leasing of Federal lands for oil and gas exploration, he not only ensured an energy price shock. He would spike food prices. To understand why is to understand the stagflationary morass America now finds itself in.
Amidst slowing economic growth, America’s working classes and small businesses are indeed under attack from a virulent inflation. Milk is up 4.5% annually, beef 13.9%, used car and truck prices have broken the 30% barrier while gas prices are up nearly 60%. While gross pay has increased by 4.8%, real wages are down by nearly 2%.
This pandemic-driven and politician-made disaster is a situation eerily similar to a 1970s stagflation spawned by over-stimulative Keynesian policies and related demand-pull inflation along with cost-push inflation energy and food price shocks.