Sen. Josh Hawley is blasting President Biden and his administration’s policies for turning the US into a “land of scarcity” that is placing heavy burdens on American families.
”Long a land of abundance, the United States has become a land of scarcity under President Joe Biden,” Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote in an opinion piece on Fox News published Wednesday.
“Store shelves are increasingly empty, the cost of basic goods is soaring, supply chains are failing, foreign imports are backlogged at our ports, and a government-induced energy crunch has driven up prices at the pump to seven-year highs,” he wrote in the piece, adding, ”American families are bearing the brunt of this crisis.”
Hawley, a member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, pointed out that White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki acknowledged that the administration “cannot guarantee” that Christmas presents will arrive on time because of the supply bottleneck. The Energy Department also warned that Americans could see their heating bills jump 54 percent this winter, and schools are scrambling to serve students lunch.
“American families shouldn’t be facing a skyrocketing cost of living. Christmas should never be a season of scarcity. Schools should never struggle to feed their students,” Hawley said.
”It didn’t have to be this way. President Biden, the architect of this crisis, has implemented a series of reckless policies that have worsened shortages and inflation, and now threaten to push our economy to the breaking point,” the GOP senator said.
Shoppers in a suburb of Washington, DC, told Fox News that the supply-chain bottleneck is contributing to high prices that are hitting them in the wallet.
“Can’t afford half the stuff … I think it’s outrageous,” a shopper in Lanham, Md., told Fox News.
“You can definitely feel the difference … it takes an impact on your entire life,” a Wegmans shopper told Fox News.
According to the Consumer Price Index, the cost of food has increased 4.6 percent since last year, with the prices for meat, poultry, fish and eggs topping the list of food items at 10.5 percent.
Hawley also blamed Biden for failing to end the coronavirus mask and vaccine mandates, and for empowering Dr. Anthony Fauci and other health officials to “perpetuate a permanent state of emergency.”
He said those mandates have hampered consumer spending at restaurants, bars and movie theaters, and depressed the travel industry.
“Less spending on the service sector not only decimated local economies but turbocharged the demand for physical goods. This has placed an unprecedented strain on global supply chains and caused our trade deficit with China to surge towards new highs,” Hawley said.
He said Biden’s coronavirus relief plan Democrats passed in March that extended unemployment benefits gave workers an incentive to stay home, creating labor shortages that combined with COVID mandates hurt the transportation and construction industries.
And despite rising gas prices, Hawley said Biden is kowtowing to activists in the Democratic Party and including funds to fight climate change in his $3.5 trillion Build Back Better spending plan.
Biden’s policies, he said, have resulted in a “perfect storm … that will only make the problems worse.”
“Increasing demand without bolstering supply will not only further accelerate inflation — which, by the way, is not transitory — but will push our supply-chain crisis toward calamity,” Hawley said.
Instead, Hawley said the US should focus on American workers and not the profits of multinational corporations.
”We need to rebuild an economy that prioritizes American workers and supply chain security over corporate profit,” he said.
