Posted by Dana Loesch Nov 10th 2010 at 4:58 am in Economics, Featured Story, Wall Street Journal, media bias Upon reading Slate writer John Dickerson’s breadcrumbs piece attempting to provide backup to Sudeep Reddy’s shark jump in response to Palin’s QE2 remarks.
Palin’s call yesterday for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to “cease and desist” with a second round of deliberate inflation and simplified the far-reaching effect the devalued dollar has on average Americans:
I’m deeply concerned about the Federal Reserve’s plans to buy up anywhere from $600 billion to as much as $1 trillion of government securities. The technical term for it is “quantitative easing.” It means our government is pumping money into the banking system by buying up treasury bonds. And where, you may ask, are we getting the money to pay for all this? We’re printing it out of thin air.
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All this pump priming will come at a serious price. And I mean that literally: everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher. And it’s not just groceries. Oil recently hit a six month high, at more than $87 a barrel. The weak dollar – a direct result of the Fed’s decision to dump more dollars onto the market – is pushing oil prices upwards. That’s like an extra tax on earnings.Sudeep Reddy couldn’t tangle with Palin’s correct assertion that the Fed’s choice of inflation (one of a couple ways this administration believes to be the panacea for a recession: inflation, tax hike) actually contributes to the toxic environment which has scared businesses and investors from further revenue growth and job creation, so Reddy relies on straw man to afford the jab.
Palin tries to draw the concerns about quantitative easing to inflation today and falls short. She says, “everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher.”
Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact. The consumer price index’s measure of food and beverages for the first nine months of this year showed average annual inflation of less than 0.6%, the slowest pace on record (since the Labor Department started keeping this measure in 1968). Even if you pick a single snapshot — say, September’s year-over-year increase in prices — that was just 1.4%, far better than the 6% annual increase for food prices recorded in September 2008.
The overall consumer price index was up 1.1% in September from a year earlier. Apart from September 2009 (when prices were down 1.3%), that was the slowest annual inflation rate for September since the early 1960s. That’s not strong evidence to argue about rising prices today.Palin responded:
… I read an article by Sudeep Reddy in today’s Wall Street Journal criticizing the fact that I mentioned inflation in my comments about QE2 in a speech this morning before a trade-association. Here’s what I said: “everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher.”
Mr. Reddy takes aim at this. He writes: “Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact.” Really? That’s odd, because just last Thursday, November 4, I read an article in Mr. Reddy’s own Wall Street Journal titled “Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise Prices: Packagers and Supermarkets Pressured to Pass Along Rising Costs, Even as Consumers Pinch Pennies.”
The article noted that “an inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants…Prices of staples including milk, beef, coffee, cocoa and sugar have risen sharply in recent months.”Even funnier, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board agreed with Palin’s analysis:
The former Alaskan Governor showed sound political and economic instincts by inveighing forcefully against the Federal Reserve’s latest round of quantitative easing. According to the prepared text of remarks that she released to National Review online, Mrs. Palin also exhibited a more sophisticated knowledge of monetary policy than any major Republican this side of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan.
Stressing the risks of Fed “pump priming,” Mrs. Palin zeroed in on the connection between a “weak dollar—a direct result of the Fed’s decision to dump more dollars onto the market”—and rising oil and food prices. She also noted the rising world alarm about the Fed’s actions, which by now includes blunt comments by Germany, Brazil, China and most of Asia, among many others.
“We don’t want temporary, artificial economic growth brought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings,” the former GOP Vice Presidential nominee said. “We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It’s the only way we can get our economy back on the right track.”A WSJ reporter who denied the very facts reported in the … WSJ and cited by Palin. If it wasn’t already silly enough, Slate, detecting blood in the water, but from Reddy, not Palin, comes bounding into the discussion with all the zeal and exuberance of a lovable St. Bernard and possessing all the economic intelligence of one.
Instead of focusing on how the WSJ effectively pwned its own writer, or why the unaccountable Fed is determined to propel inflation as an economic stimulant, Dickerson makes the story about himself and prattles on for several never-ending graphs about how his Reddy-copy comments (already settled by the WSJ editorial board, even) were – GASP – deleted from Palin’s Facebook page.
I made this point in a few sentences and posted them on Palin’s Facebook page in the space allotted for readers to participate in the conversations she starts. I wanted to see if any of the other participants would respond, as they sometimes do. They didn’t—because within two minutes, my post had been deleted from the steady stream of acclaim from Palin fans congratulating her for tweaking the media and urging her to run for president. It’s the first time I’ve been kicked out of a place of worship.Because with the impending QE2, a shaky economy where 87% of Americans (according to Nov. 2 exit polling data) say they’re worried about the future of the economy, where 29% say that someone in their household lost a job within the past two years, where 41% say they’re worse off now financially than they were two years ago, the REAL issue is why Dickerson is barred from trolling Palin’s personal Facebook page. The real issue is whether food prices SIGNIFICANTLY or MODERATELY increased (that they increased is understood), but not how, why, or will they continue to increase (WSJ says yes), but that Palin used an adjective not to Dickerson’s liking (or whether Reddy’s use of “hyperbole” is, in fact, hyperbole).
In assailing their debunked perception of Palin’s ignorance Dickerson and Reddy showed their own.
If the liberal media spent as much time trying to hold the Fed as accountable as they try with Palin and their straw man arguments, perhaps we would have greater transparency and accountability in our economic system.
Big Journalism
