President Joe Biden doesn’t have a strong vision for the future, so he keeps focusing on the past. Biden won’t stop going after former President Trump and keeps attacking what he calls the GOP’s “Ultra-MAGA” agenda.
The most recent rant came while the president was trying to explain his plan to defeat inflation. Everybody in leadership can see that this is the most important issue for the American public. The national average price for a gallon of gasoline reached a record high of $4.37 a gallon, according to AAA. So Biden wanted citizens to feel like he was taking the inflation problem seriously. He charged from a podium at an event in the South Court Auditorium that inflation was his “top domestic priority.”
You get the sense that the whole Democratic Party sees inflation as a series of landmines as we march toward the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans continually point to the White House and the president’s domestic agenda when they talk about inflation, and the Democrats make an attempt to point their fingers at supply chain issues, the pandemic, and Putin’s war in Ukraine. They are trying to pin the problem on anything but what they see in their mirror.
So President Biden tried to summon up some fervor on Tuesday in his speech by focusing on what he hopes resembles accomplishments that will lessen the financial pressure on Americans. He talked about the historic release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and said it would compensate for rising gas prices and reduce the national deficit. The president described calls on Congress to pass portions of his beaten-up agenda so that prices of prescription drugs and health care costs could be lowered.
And, of course, he railed against the GOP accusing them of not having a plan to address inflation.
“They have no plan to bring down energy prices today. No plan to get us to a cleaner energy independent future tomorrow. My plan is to lower everyday costs for hardworking Americans and lower the deficit by asking large corporations and the wealthiest Americans to not engage in price gouging and to pay their fair share in taxes,” Biden said.
He also said that Republicans do have a plan to increase taxes on the middle class and let billionaires as well as big companies “off the hook.”
Biden is choosing to target a plan from Florida GOP Senator Rick Scott, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. His plan would have all Americans pay some income tax to deal with the economic problems. But Senator Mitch McConnell has distanced himself from this plan and it has not been approved.
“If we are fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader, I’ll decide in consultation with my members, what to put on the floor,” McConnell said.
He went further and promised that a Republican Senate majority would not put on the table a plan that raised taxes on half of the American people.
Biden is not the only one in the administration that is talking about the “ultra-MAGA” Republicans. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, reiterated Biden’s verbiage and talked about those who supported Scott’s tax plan, and those who would sunset Medicare and Social Security programs.
“And it’s also the obsession with culture wars and wars against Mickey Mouse and banning books. The president thinks that is extreme,” Psaki said.
According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, there are close to 70% of Americans don’t approve of the way Biden is handling inflation. Instead of leading with vision, President Biden can only lash out at the platform in the last election. Is it any wonder people are putting their trust in Republicans to fix the economy?
