Biden/Harris cheerleading over what remains an intolerably high inflation rate, particularly for working classes, amounts to their own “let them eat cake” insult to the Joad families of America.

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In the history of American literature, no family personalized the hardscrabble struggles of everyday Americans more poignantly and prominently than the Joad family of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”  

That novel and subsequent film classic captured the Great Depression plight of the Joads, who migrated westward toward California following eviction from their Great Plains homesteads.  Their struggles along the way symbolized the hardships faced not only by millions of Americans during that era, but more broadly the eternal difficulties of working classes fighting to keep their proverbial heads above water.  

Through subsequent decades, the Joads came to symbolize the “common man” of American political discourse, especially for Democrats who sought to position themselves as champions of the underprivileged.  Exploiting Steinbeck’s themes of economic challenge, societal indifference and human resilience for their own partisan purposes, Democrats sought to present themselves and their platform as the path to betterment for America’s Joads.  From Franklin Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson and beyond, Democratic presidents referenced the Joads to advance New Deal and Great Society programs and draw a direct line from the Joads’ struggles to their economic and social policy agendas.  

The fictional Joad family thus served as a powerful symbol for the Democratic Party’s narrative, representing their alleged commitment to working Americans in their struggle against challenges they faced throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century.  

After nearly four disastrous years in office, however, Biden/Harris administration policies and performance failures have obliterated any remaining claim to that ideal.  

Perhaps no recent moment manifested that abandonment better than last month when the Biden/Harris administration celebrated official government data showing a 2.9% inflation rate for the month of July.  It offered a stark illustration of just how much the “new normal” has been defined downward after four years under their mismanagement.  

As an initial matter, that 2.9% number is still more than twice as high as it was when Biden and Harris entered office with a 1.4% inflation rate they inherited from Donald Trump in January 2021.  Moreover, that comes atop three years of previous inflation that reached as high as 9.1%.  

Here’s why those numbers are particularly punishing for America’s working-class Joad families, and why Biden/Harris attempts to celebrate them are especially insulting.  

Within the government’s inflation data, one sees that what moderation has occurred largely centers on comparative discretionary items like automobiles, airline tickets and electronic purchases.  For necessities that consumers must buy, however, prices continue to rise at higher rates, as noted by The Wall Street Journal:  

But prices for many of the things that are hard to live without are still posting eye-watering price increases.  Rent and electricity bills are up 10% or more over the past two years, and car-insurance costs are up nearly 40%, according to the Labor Department’s index.  Shoppers might be able to trade down from prime steak to cheaper cuts of meat at the supermarket, but they can’t really do the same thing with the water bill.  

Accordingly, Biden/Harris cheerleading over what remains an intolerably high inflation rate, particularly for working classes, amounts to their own “let them eat cake” insult to the Joad families of America.  

Meanwhile, the administration brags about jobs, but the government just admitted that it overestimated its earlier job growth estimates by a preposterous 818,000 jobs.  Also on the jobs front, unemployment is now up nearly a full percentage point over the past year, so that trend is troublingly negative.  

Elsewhere, such Biden/Harris luxury obsessions like so-called “Net Neutrality” government socialization of the internet would punish all Americans who use the internet.   According to the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan, however, its effects would hit lower-income American consumers most of all.  

Collectively, these and other accumulated items over four years of mismanagement create a mosaic of misery for America’s working classes.  As November approaches, Americans must ponder whether they’re willing to accept this as the new normal, or opt for policies of smaller government and less regulation that brought prosperity without high inflation, interest rates and despair, especially for America’s Joad families.