Thursday, May 13, 2021

Welcome Back, Carter

Gas lines, inflation fears, problems with Iran, Roger Stone... all we need now is a helicopter evacuation off the rooftop of the embassy in Kabul and we'll have the whole 1970s vibe down cold.

Considering that he got his start in politics back in the Seventies, when probably the two biggest issues that didn't involve the Cold War were Crime and Inflation, Biden seems pretty unconcerned about either issue, at least publicly.

On inflation...
“A specter is haunting the Biden administration—the specter of inflation,” writes Matthew Continetti at the conservative Washington Free Beacon. “[F]or a politician who came to Washington in 1973, Joe Biden has a lackadaisical attitude toward inflationary fiscal and monetary policy. Was he paying attention? It was the great inflation of the ’60s and ’70s, caused in part by high spending, the Arab oil embargo, and spiraling wages and prices in a heavily regulated and unionized economy, that helped ruin the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.”
...and crime...
Looking at it from today’s relatively safe world, you might be tempted to think concerns about crime were overwrought, but as criminal justice professor Barry Latzer observed, “Starting in the late 1960s, when the Great Crime Tsunami rolled over the nation, the [New York City’s] murder rates soared above 10 per 100,000 for a sustained period, skyrocketing to a terrifying 30.1 in 1990. Memories of those years haunt us still...”
...it's getting to feel like That Seventies Show.

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