I’m not ready to endorse Sundance’s theory on The Conservative Treehouse, but it provides an interesting perspective by which to judge events going forward:

The near horizon looks pretty clear. Gasoline will keep rising fast and will cost $6 to $7/gal before next spring. There is no way under current Joe Biden policy to avoid this, unless he was to completely abandon his energy policy; that’s not likely. The climate change ideologues, academics and far-left communists behind the Biden policy are not likely to see the catastrophic economic damage as a bad thing, instead they will likely say it’s the new normal.

With that level of supply side economic chaos seemingly unavoidable, the only way for Biden to try and mitigate political damage is an attempt to halt the demand side. That’s why the administration needs Omicron.

Under this theory, fear-mongering over new variants of COVID acts almost like raising interest rates to cool the economy, only powerful special interests would be the first hurt by that means (ah, trickle-down), whereas keeping people home and not spending hurts the powerless masses, first.