MSNBC regular and blowhard Donny Deutsch insisted the Democrats’ laundry list of inflation-exacerbating spending initiatives throughout President Joe Biden’s time in office was just the epitome of competence.
Insufferable MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough belched that the the people running the Michigan and Arizona GOP are supposedly “even bigger insurrectionists, bigger weirdos, bigger freaks” than the 2022 electoral cycle. The smug Deutsch, who once claimed that one in three Americans were racists, regurgitated Scarborough's anti-GOP drivel and praised the Democrats’ “blocking and tackling” starting “with our president.” Deutsch started throwing out economically disastrous leftist pipe dreams like “the climate bill,” Biden’s so-called “Build Back Better,” and the misnamed $739 billion “Inflation Reduction Act [IRA]” and argued these made Democrats the “party of competence.” The GOP, in Deutsch’s view, was just the “lug nut, nut job party” by contrast.
Perhaps Deutsch memory-holed how Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus monstrosity – part of the so-called “Build Back Better” framework – was a driving force behind the inflation crisis that now plagues America. Biden and company also tried to ram through an additional $2 trillion “Build Back Better Act.” The bill was so extreme that even West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin (D) pulled his support. Biden eventually signed a scaled back version — dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act — into law in August 2022 even as the country faced a sky-high 8.5 percent year-over-year inflation rate. Even Texas Tech University economist Benjamin Powell rebuked a scaled-back version the month prior by calling it “worse in our current [inflation-rattled] economic environment.” Economists excoriated the eco-charged IRA for being a recipe for potentially making inflation worse.
Economist Brian Riedl ripped Deutsch's ignorant rant apart in comments to MRC Business: "No party that ignores all economist warnings and shoots a $1.9 trillion stimulus bazooka at a supply-constrained economy - pouring gasoline on the inflation fire - gets to call itself the party of competence."
Clearly, Deutsch doesn’t have a grasp on what the term “competence” means. Even former Obama economist Jason Furman conceded Feb. 24 that America has made “little if any progress” on fighting inflation. This is despite the Federal Reserve aggressively hiking interest rates after it — along with Biden — paid lip service to taxpayers for months claiming that the price spikes would only be temporary.
Former U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary for the Financial Stability Oversight Council Howard B. Adler pointed out in a Feb. 20 op-ed that the Fed and Biden are currently engaged in an economic tug-of-war. Drawing from the findings of a St. Louis Fed study, Adler summarized that “while the Fed has been battling to reduce inflation by raising interest rates, the Biden administration has been working at cross purposes to boost inflation by increasing government spending.” But for Deutsch, the left and “competency” are somehow synonymous. For an easily-triggered MSNBC personality who has a record of making wild comparisons between former President Donald Trump and Hitler, Deutsch is probably not the best authority to lecture people on what actual “competence” looks like.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact MSNBC at (800) 952-5210 and demand it stop behaving like flunkies for President Joe Biden and company.
