A GEEZER A FEW APPLES SHY OF A PICNIC CLAIMS DORITOS BAG UP A FEW CHIPS SHORT OF A PORTION.

Dementia Joe couldn't bestir himself to give a Super Bowl interview, even with regime media CBS carrying the game.  His social media team, though, juiced him up enough to turn him loose to slag on a few of the usual Big Game sponsors.  "Who would have thought Biden himself would come out in defense of reasonably portioned bags of Doritos?"  Whether the issue first occurred to him the last time Hunter had the munchies is left to the reader as an exercise.  Everybody in populist-conservative social media had instant fun food.

I did not predict leaning into the aging issue with an Andy-Rooney-on-quaaludes rant about how chip bags used to be fuller. https://t.co/XnHhLLFZoD

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) February 11, 2024

National Review contributor Dominic Pino continues with the economics lesson.

“Sports-drinks bottles are smaller, bag of chips has fewer chips, but they’re still charging us just as much,” the president said. The video shows an image of products including Gatorade and Doritos, both of which have undergone shrinkflation in recent years. But the changes in their amounts were made in 2022, when inflation was much higher than it is today. CNN had a story about ice-cream shrinkflation, which Biden also complains about, back in 2021.

It’s peculiar for the president to be recycling news stories from two or more years ago and, in doing so, draw attention to his own poor record on inflation. Companies don’t want to bother their customers with shrinkflation. Sometimes they have to, though, in response to poor monetary and fiscal policy that spurs inflation.

The Federal Reserve pursued an expansionary monetary policy for much too long during the Covid pandemic, which was out of Biden’s control. But he piled on with the American Rescue Plan Act, which included nearly $2 trillion of completely unnecessary government spending that even left-leaning economists warned would be inflationary. And as the federal government continues to run massive budget deficits, the Fed will continue to feel pressure to monetize the new debt by increasing the money supply further in the future.

Naturally, some companies redesigned their packaging to reduce the quantity of their products and cut costs. That’s what we should expect them to do in response to poor government policy that spurred inflation. For the president to now attack them for doing that, years after the fact, is bizarre.

Is it any more bizarre than FJB fancying himself the logical successor to FDR and LBJ?  Heck, he probably thinks he's from the government and he's here to help.  It is up to us, the Militant Normals, to bear witness and call attention.

Inflation isn’t a corporate conspiracy. It’s the product of poor monetary and fiscal policy. Biden says he’s beating inflation, but apparently he wants to make it an issue again, so it’s worth reminding him of the facts.

Or perhaps, as Reason's Eric Boehm might be hinting at, we're simply seeing Dementia Joe demonstrating his ability to screw things up.

As a political matter, this video is effectively a flashing sign telling voters: "Hey, did you think inflation was less bad now? Actually, it's still happening!" In what world is that helping Biden? For that matter, when was the last time the president actually bought himself a pint of ice cream or a bag of chips—with his own money, in a real grocery store? The more you think about it, the less sense this video makes. The White House should probably stop taking messaging advice from [Elizabeth "Fauxahontas"] Warren.

The time to fix inflation is before it starts. Once it gets rolling, it is difficult to control and tends to make voters (understandably) quite irritable. There's nothing Biden can do, at this point, to fix "shrinkflation," so the most powerful man in the world is reduced to looking like an out-of-touch old guy shaking his fist at the sky. That's an accurate image, but probably not the one the White House intended to send.

Mr Boehm opened his article with a similar observation about calling attention to one's policy failures.

You might expect the president, now that he's in the middle of a re-election campaign, to try to avoid anything to do with that topic. Don't remind voters of how rough the past few years have been, focus on the future, talk about the positive signals coming from the economy, and above all else don't make yourself look like an old man yelling at a cloud.

After last week Thursday, does anybody see the Leader of the Free World as anything other than an out-of-touch geezer, yelling at a cloud, or shaking his fist at the sky, or complaining that his pudding cups are smaller these days?