From the Left, Steven Rattner Warned of Bidenflation

BUCK: Steve Rattner, who was private equity guy, has made a ton of money. Look, there are a lot of super-rich libs out there, as you all know, right? It’s fascinating because the libs are the socialists, but they’re also the billionaires, most of the billionaires, and they’re often very left wing in their policy choices while they’re going between homes in Vail and Nantucket.

CLAY: Well, you can be a super capitalist — and I think some of these guys are really old school Democrats who are super billionaire that don’t fit the party now. But what’s interesting about what he’s saying is, “Yeah, if we put trillions of more dollars into the economy, inflation is gonna get way worse.”

BUCK: The op-ed that he wrote — in the New York Times, no less — was, “I Warned Democrats About Inflation.” Now it is here, and they’re gonna keep doing the thing that we warned them against. I think it’s an important point this guy makes. He was involved in the GM bailout, which — a lot of people now forget — involved breaking legal contract with the bondholders for GM in favor of the unions, the autoworkers unions, which is an important Democrat constituency in those states involved.

Anyway, Rattner was involved in the GM bailout situation. So, he was an advisor to the Treasury department under Obama, a left-wing guy but a very rich guy. Plenty of those out there. Terry McAuliffe, Nancy Pelosi, all these rich libs running around that want socialism and Green New Deal stuff for everybody else while they fly around in private jets. But what Rattner says in the article is we already had a $1.9 trillion spending bill.

CLAY: Exactly what we’ve been saying.

BUCK: Yeah, earlier this year, and he says he told people then — and when he says people, he means Democrats, and he’s got connections at the top level. He’s like, guys, this is gonna have negative effects. You’ve got people that don’t want to go to work. They’re being paid to stay home. You have too much fear in the blue states for the economies to get up and running at the level they should be because of all the Fauciism that’s going on with the lockdowns and the rest of it.

You spent the $1.9 trillion and now you’ve spent the money on the infrastructure bill and you’re gonna be adding a few trillion on top of that. The biggest threat politically to this presidency is inflation, and you are insisting on doing the one thing… Democrats are like a kid who’s burned his hand on the stove who then goes, “Now I’m gonna put both hands on the hot stove!” What are they doing?

CLAY: They passed a $1.9 trillion bill. Now they combine that with the $1.2 trillion infrastructure, in conjunction with all of the bailout cash that was spent in 2020. We are talking about the biggest deficits that have existed since World War II. We spent more money, Buck, responding to covid than we did to win World War II. Think about that for a minute. It is absolute insanity.

So the idea that we are not going to have massive inflation for substantial periods of time to come is Modern Monetary Theory, which is basically magical realism meets economics, and this is what I’ve been saying. There aren’t that many adults understanding economic leadership at all in the Biden White House. It’s funny that the Obama economic team is now saying, “What are these imbeciles doing?” basically. That’s the subtext of Rattner’s speech.

BUCK: It’s amazing to see some Democrats who, I think, honestly are… They just see the writing on the wall. They know what’s coming.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They know this is a function of numbers, of math, ultimately, and the chance of Joe Biden getting reelected or whatever happens there with the whole, “Is he gonna try to run again? Is there gonna be someone else? whatever it may be. The chance of Democrats having another four years the presidency, the chance of Democrats coming out of the midterm election without an epic wipeout in the Congress —

CLAY: Cataclysmic. Yes.

BUCK: — if we have inflation starting to look like it’s gonna be 7%, 8%, 9%? They’re done, and yet what else do they offer the American people at this point? They have no vision for the country the vision is spend a whole lot of money and tell you at what to do and stay home and double mask, basically. So when it comes to money, it’s all downside.

CLAY: They’re doubling down to stupidity because they have no actual planning that makes sense going forward.