Biden has flown to the G20 summit in Rome, with his White House announcing a compromise with moderate Democrats over the price tag of his massive Build Back Better Bill. Biden’s meeting with world leaders abroad comes as inflation grips most Americans at home. With supply chains bottle-necked, including cargo ships unable to unload their goods in American ports, and prices rising from gasoline to food, many fear inflation is here to stay.
Former Chief of Staff to President Trump, Mick Mulvaney, told The Cats Roundtable that Biden seemed to not understand the scope of the issue. While President Biden had extended hours at the Long Beach port to help relieve the delays, Mulvaney said there were “a thousand things that they need to be doing.”
“Just fixing the port hours is not going to solve the problem,” Mulvaney said about Biden’s lack of action. “Because you got so many other places where the Federal government is involved with the supply chain.” He told The Cats Roundtable that everything that could go wrong is “going wrong right now” and said Biden’s reaction, or lack of, was “really disturbing.”
The failure of Biden’s White House to resolve the supply chain crisis has moved governors to act, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but Mulvaney said the Federal government should be taking the lead.
Instead of taking the lead, Democrats have pushed back on the idea that inflation and supply chain issues were tied to Democratic policies. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said elevated inflation would prove “transitory” mid-October, but Mulvaney questioned whether “transitory” was a euphemism.
“She was assuring everyone that inflation is transitory,” Mulvaney told The Cats Roundtable, “and I kept waiting for someone in the press to ask her what that word means.”
Are transitory 30 days, 30 months, or 30 years? Mulvaney said it was a word designed to not “answer any questions.”
Mulvaney was clear with The Cats Roundtable that inflation was here to stay in some regards thanks to Democratic spending.
“I keep wondering when the Democrats are going to wake up and admit they’re just willing to accept higher inflation for the foreseeable future,” he explained.
But instead of trying to resolve the rising costs, Biden’s Build Back Better bill plans to spend more. He told The Cats Roundtable that the drama between Democrats would give way, calling Senator Joe Manchin “a reliable vote” despite his disagreements with other Democrats.
“Joe Manchin is not a republican…they usually rely on him, and the describe him as a reliable vote”
But while Democrats might pass their Build Back Better bill, Mulvaney believed Democratic missteps would lead to a “reckoning at the ballot box” in 2022.
“Elections still have consequences in this country, I’m glad that they do,” Mulvaney told The Cats Roundtable. “And as far as I’m concerned, the mid-term elections can’t get here fast enough.”
But the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections on November 2nd could be a bellwether for the outcome of 2022. Mulvaney said if Republicans could come even within a couple of points, let alone win, then it could “send shock waves through the Democratic establishment,” calling the outcomes potentially a “harbinger for what happens a year from now.”
