Rampell: Inflation Is Not Biden’s Fault, There’s Very Little He Can Do About It

EXCERPT:

RAMPELL: “But it is also that people had a lot of savings from last year. They have money in the bank. That money is burning a hole in their pocket, so to speak. They want to spend it and they are trying to buy more stuff even than they were pre-pandemic, they are shifting more of their spending to goods, at the same time that goods are difficult to get through the supply chain. All of that is driving inflation up. And that is happening worldwide to some extent. It’s not Biden’s fault. And to the same idea, Biden has relatively little that he can do about it. He can kind of change some things on the margins. You know, he’s made efforts to get ports operating at longer hours, for example. I think that he could be doing more on expediting work permits for legal immigrants, things like that, which the administration has not done. But even all of those things put together probably won’t make a huge dent. What we need to see happen is we need to see the pandemic more in the rear view mirror and have things normalized and have supply chains normalized, so that when people want to buy stuff from around the world, it gets to them more easily, more quickly and more cheaply.”