Claim: Biden’s false claims about inflation are actually just claiming that the causes of inflation were already in place by the time President Joe Biden took office.
Verdict: False and misleading.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s false claim that inflation was 9% when he took office was not the cause of inflation reaching that high level. The purpose was to point out that January 2020.
Biden this week repeated his false claim that inflation was 9% when he took office. It was a comment he first made last week in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett. This week, he repeated the falsehood in an interview with Yahoo! finance.
Biden: “I think inflation has gone up a little bit. It was 9 percent when I took office.” Said During the interview. “And now it’s down about 3%.”
The latest data available at the time of Biden’s interview showed year-over-year inflation in March at 3.5%. On Wednesday, the Labor Department announced that the inflation rate had fallen to 3.4%. Inflation has not been below 3% since March 2021. When Mr. Biden took office, the consumer price index was up 1.4% from the previous year.
Jean-Pierre was asked at a press conference Wednesday by Fox Business Network reporter Edward Lawrence about Biden’s repeated lies about inflation.
“I want to hear how the president talks about inflation. He’s said twice in the last two weeks that the inflation rate was 9% when he took office. Is the president misleading the American people about that? Or did he just not realize that the inflation rate was 1.4 percent when he took office?” Lawrence asked.
Jean-Pierre responded that the president’s claims should not be taken literally. He said the inflation rate was 9% to argue that “inflationary factors” were in place when he took office.
“What he’s saying is that the factors that caused inflation were already in place when he came to power,” Jean-Pierre said.
Jean-Pierre said the highest inflation in 40 years was an inevitable result of the pandemic and the reopening of the economy.
“It was inevitable that the reopening of the economy after the pandemic would release pent-up demand and cause inflation to rise. Once we restarted the economy, inflation rose rapidly,” Jean-Pierre said. .
Verdict: False and misleading.
Biden made no claims about the cause of inflation. He said the inflation rate was 9% when he took office, which is incorrect. The year-on-year increase in the consumer price index did not reach 9% until June 2022, about a year and a half after Biden took office.
Jean-Pierre’s claim that the factors that would cause inflation to rise to 9%, the highest since 1981, were in place before Biden took office is misleading and contradicts President Biden’s previous statements on inflation. are doing.
“No one is suggesting that unchecked inflation is underway. Not a serious economist,” Biden falsely said on July 19, 2021.
This was not true. At the time, economist Larry Summers had been warning for months that the Biden administration’s liberal spending policies would push up inflation. In an interview with CNN, Summers explained that the Biden administration’s American Rescue Act made the mistake of stimulating too much demand without taking steps to increase supply. That caused inflation.
Mr. Summers was Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, chief economist at the World Bank, director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and president of Harvard University.
It’s an old lie, but it’s related to Biden’s latest lies. If the factors that cause inflation are already in place, why did Mr. Biden claim that inflation would not be a problem in the summer of 2021?
Jean-Pierre’s argument that the reopening freed up pent-up demand that made inflation “inevitable,” as Summers and many Republicans said at the time, was a sign that the American Rescue Plan’s $1.9 trillion suggests that economic stimulus is not only unnecessary in 2021, but also irresponsible. So, in an attempt to defend Biden’s latest falsehood, she is slamming his signature bill in his first year in office.
Even if Mr. Biden hadn’t been spending recklessly, the United States likely would have experienced some higher inflation as it emerged from pandemic lockdowns. There was pent-up demand, and U.S. households had surplus savings from previous stimulus packages and spending cuts caused by lockdowns. Global supply chains were disrupted, hampering the ability of economies to absorb the surge in spending.
But without the Biden administration’s policies, the 9% spike would not have happened. As of March 2021, Federal Reserve officials’ median inflation forecast was for the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index to rise to 2.4% in the same year and fall to 2% the following year. Even if inflation had remained this low, it would still be the highest rate since 2011.
However, once Biden took over the White House, inflation rose significantly. The 2021 PCE price index rose 4.2% in 2021 and 6.5% the following year, the highest since 1981. The year-on-year rate of increase in inflation, as measured by the PCE price index, peaked at 7.1% in June 2022.
