LARRY KUDLOW: Did the Bidens think that nobody in America would notice this balloon?

On the eve of the President Biden’s address to the US Congress, meaning tomorrow night, Joe Biden is trapped in two major lies. Both are attempts to cover up policy failures and a clear lack of leadership in foreign policy and economics.

First of all, this is the so-called Chinese weather balloon. I know it was a spy mission, and I also know that the CCP is as truthful as Mr. Biden. The big lie here is that these spy ball episodes happen all the time.

According to Biden’s world, they happened at least three times during the Trump years. We just didn’t notice it. Well, saying so doesn’t make it so.

A whole bunch of Trump foreign policy officials, by the way, people who don’t often agree with each other or with their former boss for that matter, have vehemently denied that Chinese spy balloons fell from the sky during the previous administration. .

Count Them: Former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and John Bolton. An unexpected couple. Former Directors of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and Rick Grenell. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who didn’t like anyone in the Trump administration, and former Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, who was often critical of his former boss. Throw in former National Security Adviser Keith Kellogg.

All these people were my colleagues, I know them well and have never heard them agree with each other on any issue other than the Chinese balloon. So, Mr. Biden has a problem here, I think. I don’t know how they’re going to get out of this. We’ll be talking about all this with former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe in a few minutes.

CHINESE EXPERT SOUNDS AN ALARM ABOUT SPY BALL ABOVE US: “WHAT THEY DO IS VERY DANGEROUS”

Like everyone in America, I still can’t wait to find out why Biden didn’t shoot down the balloon when he first entered American airspace over Alaska, where there are no people on the ground, or when he stumbled upon Montana, over our nuclear anti-tank complex. . -ballistic missile systems, where there can be five people on the ground. Did the Bidens think that no one in America would notice this balloon?

Did they really hope that no one would notice that Secretary of State Blinken might be meeting with China? Couldn’t they have assumed that the CCP deliberately disrupted Blinken’s visit to check on Mr. Biden? This is an old Chinese tactic, and doesn’t Mr. Biden understand how this lowers America’s position in the world? What happens if we start sending balloons over China? How long do you think they will last in the high skies?

Is this completely and completely different from Biden’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan, when, leaving huge amounts of military equipment and thousands and thousands of American friends on the ground and turning against his own military advisers, Biden later tried to tell the American public that it was, in fact, a big success? Really?! Have the Chinese forgotten about this? Doubtful.

Or failed diplomacy on the eve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, when Biden refused to take concrete action, instead empty economic threats and, of course, the Russians invaded anyway? So the US response was always a day late and there was not enough dollar?

Some commentators call it a decline in America. I disagree. What we have here is a serious decline in the current American leadership. Not only decline, but huge setbacks on the public stage, and on that public stage, there are American citizens here at home who don’t necessarily want the country to be involved in foreign wars, but they certainly don’t want the country to be pushed. around foreign dictators.

Then we return home to the Biden economy, where, yes, of course, the president is basking in a strong number of workplaces came out last Friday, but then he comes out and tells people that runaway inflation is inherited from the Trump administration. Really?!

Trump’s most recent CPI report in January 2021 was 1.4%. Mr. Biden’s spending policy increased it to over 9% over the next 18 months, and I have to say that jobs alone don’t make history. For all of 2022, the US economy grew by just 1% with an inflation rate of 6.3%. I would call it a stagflationary recession.

Mr. Biden somehow boasts of the restoration of production. Well, purchasing managers report that production is down 18% in the past 12 months. Consumer spending generally declined in November and December. As well as retail sales. Just like industrial production. Just like construction and home sales, as well as productivity.

The weak side of Biden’s inflationary policy, despite the fact that the Federal Reserve has made some progress in recent months, is the constant decline in the real wages of workers. For example, from January 2021, when real wages grew by 3.9% year-on-year, to January 23, according to the latest data, real wages fell in all but three months, and by about 1.5% overall. The typical family lost $15 a week in real terms during this period. In other words, a sharp drop in purchasing power.

Finally, with much praise to our friend Liz Peak, since January 2020, with a population increase of 7 million people, the number of employees has increased by only 1.4 million in these 3 years. In other words, we seem to have lost 5.6 million people out of work.

She calls it “Achilles’ heel” Biden presidency and says that low unemployment is not a great win if millions of people are choosing not to work, living off expanded government benefits that increasingly do not require job or training requirements. Will it show up in Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address? We report, you decide.