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Amnesic Biden-Blaming Abets Authoritarian Movement

Tim Libretti, PhD
5 min readFeb 1, 2022

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I’m watching cable news the other day as a reporter talks to a man from Pennsylvania complaining about gas prices and rising prices generally. She asks him whom he holds responsible for these prices, and he responds, “I have to blame Joe.” He indicates that, at this point at least, he doesn’t plan to vote for Biden in the next election.

The reporting basically ends there, with commentary highlighting the threat inflation poses to Biden’s presidency and his re-election hopes as well as to Democrats’ chances to holding on to their tenuous control of the House and Senate in this November’s mid-terms.

What’s missing here is seemingly any effort report reality. Yes, inflation is real, but Biden is not only not responsible for it, he also has a plan, the Build Back Better Plan, to address and lower key costs of living for the average American, which Republicans have blocked at every turn.

Now and then, admittedly, analysts do, after emphasizing and elaborating the troubles inflation poses for Biden, say softly out of the other sides of their mouths, almost as an aside or after-thought, that there’s not really much a president can do about inflation. But there’s not much explanation of reality, no real effort to inform the American audience about what really causes inflation and, for that, matter, what would cure…

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Tim Libretti, PhD
Tim Libretti, PhD

Written by Tim Libretti, PhD

Professor of Literature, Political Economy enthusiast, Dad, always thinking about the optimal world

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