Timing is Everything
You have to be careful about big public proclamations…because those doing the proclaiming are often smacked down pretty quickly by the karma gods.
Recall that the Biden Administration planned a big victory party a week or so ago, to take a victory lap for the inappropriately-named Inflation Reduction Act becoming law. The usual suspects gathered at the White House…and literally as the President spoke about how wonderful everything was, the stock market cratered in the wake of new data that day showing that inflation was really not getting better. Fox News Channel even interrupted the President’s remarks to show the Dow closing sharply lower as the clearest contrast there could be.
Yesterday, in the wake of the President going on national television and the official POTUS account tweeting just the day before that gas prices had dropped to the point they were when Russia invaded Ukraine…another unfortunate-for-them change in facts. The headline—for the first time in 100 days, gas prices nationally stopped dropping, and in fact, were back on the rise.
Keep in mind, even if gas prices were back to where they were six months ago when the war in Ukraine began…that’s still well more than a dollar a gallon higher than when Biden took over. In other words, even if the so-called Putin Gas Tax was gone, the Administration still was caught trying to explain how their policies were not responsible for gas prices spiking so high to begin with…and not explaining that successfully.
That makes me concerned, and not just about gas prices or inflation. It seems when this President says something, the opposite happens. He said a lot of things in his address to the United Nations yesterday…things about world strength and solidarity against authoritarianism. Sure hope his recent luck about being proven wrong on things doesn’t hold true for that, too.
