The blame is often said to have fallen squarely on the desk of President Harry S. Truman, with the current White House preferring to whitewash, blame and run away.
One of President Joe Biden's enduring traits has been his repeated attempts to blame imaginary demons for problems of his own making, an unfortunate trait that has recently manifested itself in the administration's desperate attempts to address soaring home prices.
During a speech in Las Vegas in March, the president welcomed several proposals that he said would help would-be homebuyers — and, not surprisingly, they all involve expanding government and further redistributing wealth.
There's a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and first-home sellers, down payment assistance for some buyers courtesy of the American taxpayer, and additional regulations on closing costs.
These proposals are not expected to pass Congress, and even if they do, they are not expected to make any real difference.
Today's high housing prices are driven by two factors: high interest rates and cumbersome bureaucracy that makes it difficult to increase supply in many places.
The latter is the exact same type of market intervention that Biden and his progressive cronies have favored for decades. The former is a direct result of Biden's economic policies: Mortgage interest rates have doubled since the Federal Reserve took steps to tame the inflation generated by this administration's drunken sailor-like play, making monthly payments unaffordable for many wage earners.
But Democrats and Biden are blaming their favorite targets, evil capitalists – “institutional investors” and “greedy landlords” – for rising costs. Look in the mirror and you'll see that's not the case.
The same can be said about inflation, with the president and his defenders in Congress blaming corporate leaders for “price gouging” for the rising prices that plague American consumers.
Apparently, these crafty CEOs have waited 40 years to create inflation for an unsuspecting public and administration. But even wise Democrat-leaning economists have warned the White House that pumping trillions of dollars of new federal spending into an economy still recovering from COVID-19 could trigger price hikes. In fact, inflation hit a 40-year high of 9% in 2022. Biden did not foresee this coming.
Recent Biden campaign ads continue to miss the point, with the president going after big oil companies for soaring gasoline prices, noting that when he took office he vowed to put fossil fuel companies out of business and took executive action to curb conventional energy production.
He then ended up begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to stabilize prices. Rising energy costs are a feature, not a flaw, of the Green New Deal that progressives covet.
Finally, Biden tried to blame the chaos at the border on Republicans, which is laughable.
But one of the president's first acts after taking office was to make it easier for immigrants to apply for asylum, creating an open invitation for illegal crossings.
This was a deliberate effort by the White House to appease the far-left open-border faction that currently dominates the Democratic Party. An estimated 400,000 people entered the country illegally in 2020. Two years into the Biden administration, that number has reached a record high of 2.2 million.
Politicians from both parties routinely distort the facts for political gain, but the Biden administration has taken the lack of accountability to a new level.
