Stray Voltage, National Rent Control, and Biden's 'Bananas' Moment

There's a bit of sharp political hackery dating back to the Barack Obama administration called "stray voltage," and neither the name nor the theory was coined by Obama's critics. Obama's 2008 campaign chief and then White House senior advisor David Plouffe devised stray voltage as a way to "provoke conversation," according to Major Garrett, who first noticed and described the process, to "embed previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness."

Stray voltage also keeps the opposition — that's you and me, gentle reader — too busy with today's voltage to maintain the fight against yesterday's. Slate's John Dickerson described stray voltage as an example of Obama's "refined cynicism," which is a nice way of saying, "corrosive to our political institutions."

So while I was busy last week writing about how Presidentish Joe Biden had turned the U.S. into an official state sponsor of terrorism or how Alleged Vice President Kamala Harris had taken on unofficial duties as AI Racism Czar and just as busy this week writing about Biden's crushing new emissions rules on semi trucks, I completely missed yet another example of the "Biden" White House using Obama's stray voltage to push yet more socialism on the American public.

But Biden being Biden, instead of Obama's "refined cynicism," it's more like, "Old man yells at cloud." Except that in this case, the old man is echoing novelty New York gubernatorial candidate Jimmy McMillan and shouting, "The rent is too damn high!"

Just when I was finally going to spend an hour or two writing about something, anything other than Joe Biden, this had to come across my desk, didn't it?

The Washington Post reported late last week — sorry for the delay, but I'm dealing with 1.21 gigawatts of stray voltage here — that the Biden administration will soon announce "a new cap on how much rents can go up in certain affordable housing units that are subsidized by the federal government." Under the new rule, "yearly rent increases will be capped at 10 percent."

The rule won't apply to many units at all, because to "receive funding from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which is the largest federal affordable housing production program, developers have to commit to certain affordability rules."

The story notes that the U.S. has a longstanding and nationwide shortage of affordable rental housing. It does not note that the solution is eliminating the red tape that makes building affordable housing nearly impossible.

So it's a BS rule that won't do anything to make housing any more affordable to anyone...

...but that's not the point of stray voltage.

The Biden administration is not-so-quietly introducing the idea of national rent control into the public consciousness. An idea that was way too far out there last month will be the conventional wisdom next year.

But at least for the time being we can laugh at Biden, who — unlike Obama with his refined cynicism — seems to think his pronouncements actually mean something. Reason's Nick Gillespie nailed it on Twitter/X, posting that "As his national rent control plan suggests, Uncle Joe is entering his 'Bananas' phase, issuing impossible edicts with absolute certainty."

If you're in denial that Woody Allen is (or at least once was) a comic genius, here's the clip from Woody's "Bananas" that Nick referenced.

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