For the past four years, as both America and the world have descended in a downward spiral, from prosperity and security to recession and risk, Joe Biden has been assigned much of the blame.
That’s not unusual; the executive branch traditionally gets much of the credit for good news and much of the blame for bad news, whether deserved or not. Since Joe Biden was installed in the Oval Office on January 20, 2021, it’s not surprising that the dumpster fire of the past four years would be largely laid at his feet.
But it is not entirely fair.
And now that he appears to be off the ticket for November, 2024, to be replaced by either Kamala Harris or “some other Democrat to be named later,” it really is time we assign the blame properly.
Let’s begin with the collapse of America’s energy market. Four years ago, the United States was a net exporter of energy. America is awash in petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Our nuclear power plants are so productive, many areas don’t even need the oil, gas or coal they produce, so these can be sold abroad as soon as they’re harvested. Massive oil fields, particularly the Bakken and Alaskan fields, hold so much oil, they alone could provide America’s needs for decades. Taken all together, American fuel output could make us completely independent of OPEC if we wanted to be.
So what happened? Why do numerous states – including some of our biggest, like Texas and California – frequently suffer power blackouts that shut down factories, hospitals, distribution centers and food processing plants? Why has the gasoline that powers our cars, SUVs and minivans doubled in price? Why has the diesel fuel that powers our transportation fleet also doubled in price, causing the prices of everything we buy to skyrocket, as the single greatest driver of inflation for these past four years?
Simple. The federal government, primarily through a stack of executive orders issued in January and February 2021, has either banned, restricted, or slowed to a crawl the exploration, production, and sale of American fuel.
Yes, these EOs were issued by Joe Biden. Signed by his hand, with his pen. But they would just as quickly have been issued by any modern Democrat in that office. Opposition to “energy that works” (and its corollary too: support for energy that doesn’t work, like solar and wind) is a fundamental plank in the modern Democrat platform. Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, Newsom, Hochul, Brinson, Pritzker, Clinton – it doesn’t matter which Democrat was installed in the Oval Office; they all would have issued the same EOs and done the same amount of damage. It’s not appropriate to blame Joe Biden alone, when this deranged hatred of petroleum, natural gas, and coal is universal among that party’s politicians.
Or what of housing? Why has America’s housing stock skyrocketed in price? Why is it now so prohibitively expensive to buy a house or condo, or even to rent an apartment? In some areas, single family homes have doubled in price over the past four years. Who can afford that?
Again, the explanation is simple. As prices of everything from food to automobiles skyrocketed, largely due to a cavalcade of federal bailouts and “stimulus checks,” and the increased transportation and manufacturing costs that the energy foolishness caused, the U.S. dollar became worth less and less – that’s what inflation is, after all. We might not notice a ten or twenty or thirty percent increase in the price of eggs or soda pop at the grocery store, but we sure notice it when we buy a house, and that percentage increase now manifests in the tens of thousands of dollars.
If a young couple could have afforded a $200,000 house before, the new price of $240,000 or $260,000 or even $300,000 for the same house now puts it out of reach. No big deal, you might think; they can just rent and save for a few years more, right? But no. Rent has gone up as well. Property taxes and utility costs have gone up too, sometimes even outpacing the inflation-driven increases in property value. So it doesn’t matter whether you buy or rent, housing just takes a bigger chunk of the family’s paycheck in the Biden years than it did under the Trump years, leaving everyone with a higher cost of living (and thus its corollary: a lower standard of living).
Again, it’s easy to just blame Joe Biden; he signed those E.O.s that doubled the cost of energy; he supported those stimulus checks and bailouts. He pushed the non-infrastructure “infrastructure” bills that blew hundreds of billions of dollars on wasteful government programs.
But again, we must remember that every modern Democrat would have done the same. These policies aren’t specific to BrunchBucket Joe. Kamala Harris would have issued those stimulus checks; Gavin Newsom would have shut down those oil fields. Kathy Hochul and J.B. Pritzker raised their states’ property tax rates. They all would have spearheaded huge, unaffordable spending programs, burning up trillions of dollars on the green agenda. The only question is whether they would have managed to keep a straight face when they called it “infrastructure” or not.
So we can blame Joe Biden for this crippling inflation, this housing crisis, the outrageous food bills. It’s easy to make the case, because his name is all over the causes. But it’s really not fair.
Any modern Democrat in his shoes would have done the same, because that’s just what modern Democrat politicians do – they tax and spend; they just print money and then mail the bills to our descendants.
One modern Democrat politician is no different from any other modern Democrat politician, in these matters. Oh, they may look different and sound different, being male or female, old or young, black or white, Hispanic or Asian – but their policies are identical nowadays.
And that means the results would be equally identical.
What of our job market, as every American must now compete with millions of illegal aliens who have either jumped an unguarded border or overstayed their student visas without fear of reprisal? These tens of millions of illegal aliens, numbers that have swollen to incomprehensible levels over these past four years, are no longer just depressing wages; they’re virtually eliminating jobs and careers for American-born citizens and legal immigrants.
Similarly, the flood of illegal aliens causes all the other public sector problems you’d expect, which leads to private sector problems as well. The welfare state safety net is stretched to bursting as we try to feed, clothe, house and educate tens of millions more people who can’t provide for themselves. Another of the reasons for the housing market disaster is that practically every room is taken, with a line waiting.
And what of our current crime wave, especially in the big cities? Every city has always had bad neighborhoods and good ones, but official federal policy in the Biden years has caused those bad neighborhoods to grow. Biden’s DoJ has discouraged arresting criminals and has rewarded releasing them. Biden’s border policies have given foreign drug cartels and sex trafficking gangs both a larger market and an easier route to bring in their footsoldiers. Rather than improving the lives of the most deserving gatecrashers, as they’d have you believe, these open borders really hurt everyone, especially the legal immigrants whose neighborhoods are overrun with illicit competition.
But again, as easy as it is to blame Joe Biden for this, we must remember that these policies are nearly unanimous among modern politicians of the Democratic party. Senator Schumer, Congressman Pelosi, Majority Leader Jeffries, squad duce Ocasio-Cortez, every one of them champions this illegal funnel of problems across our border.
We could go on. The problems of the past four years are endless, from foreign policy to domestic, from culture to economy.
The Biden-Harris regime facilitated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by its weakness, enabled the October 7 attacks on Israel by funding Hamas and its sponsor Iran, encouraged the Houthis to shut down world shipping by blocking the Red Sea, simply by being too impotent to stand up for Western interests and wipe out a little jihadist artillery.
The Biden-Harris regime has encouraged the spread of gender dysphoria in our youth by appointing cross-dressers and other freaks like “Rachel” Levine and Sam Brinson to senior federal offices. The Biden-Harris regime has undone generations of accomplishments in female sports and scholarship by forcing girls’ sports to allow men – biological men in girls’ dresses and swimsuits – to invade the girls’ locker rooms and make a mockery of their competitions.
But again, even though Joe Biden’s the one who formally appointed the cabinet secretaries and department heads who implemented these destructive rules, any modern Democrat would have done the same.
What Biden did, Harris would have done, with glee. What Biden signed, Newsom or Pritzker would have signed just as quickly. What Biden pronounced, Shapiro and Walz would have proclaimed with equal fanfare.
No, it’s not fair to blame Joe Biden himself, personally, for our collapsing economy, our thralldom to China, the crime on our streets, the havoc in our classrooms.
It’s the entire Democratic party today, because they have changed so much from the party they once were, fifty or a hundred years ago.
If Joe Biden is replaced in the Oval Office by some other Democrat next January, the only thing that will improve is the press conferences.
Another Democrat might not mumble incoherently, gaze out into the distance, shake hands with imaginary visitors or wander off in the wrong direction, but any other Democrat will embrace the exact same policies, and do exactly the same damage, that these past four years have done.
To solve America’s problems, we don’t need a different donkey in the White House.
We need to kick the leftists to the curb, and elect conservatives, up and down the ballot, from coast to coast and border to border.
There just isn’t time to suffer these destructive, “intersectional,” Democrat policies any longer.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA