Putting President Biden's Disastrous Record on Inflation and the Economy in Perspective

This past Sunday, President Biden defended his disastrous economic policy record in a rare interview during “60 Minutes.” He claimed that his critics have failed to put the nation’s exploding inflation in proper perspective. President Biden tried to downplay America’s inflation crisis that has seen inflation hover between 8.3% and 9.4%. By any measure, inflation has reached its highest level in 40 years.

And yet, when asked about inflation which has been fueled by record spending during the Biden Administration coupled with a crackdown on U.S. energy independence, President Biden managed to offer a lame response: The inflation rate month-to-month is up “just an inch, hardly at all.”  Oblivious to the fact that the stock market has nosedived, that people are shocked by their grocery and electricity bills, both of which are up by double-digits, President Biden continues to argue that we are in a good position.

President Biden fails to note that the Inflation Reduction Act will raise inflation, and that energy prices are likely to rise this fall since the United States is supplying more and more energy to Europe in light of Russia’s shutdown of the Nord Stream Gas pipeline and because of his deliberate decision to end America’s energy independence. He also fails to note that analysts are cutting forecasts for U.S. growth, that interest rates are rising swiftly, or that gas prices – which were $2.39 per gallon under his predecessor – have risen now to $3.64 per gallon, which is down a bit from a 100% price increase as of June of this year.

Equally clear, President Biden remains oblivious to the fact that before he took office, weekly earnings adjusted for inflation were rising, median household income was up, and the poverty rate was down. Indeed prior to the pandemic, President Trump delivered the lowest unemployment rate in half a century, at 3.5% in February 2020. During President Trump’s first three years in office, average annual growth reached 2.5%. Meanwhile, we have reached recessionary levels under President Biden even though the pandemic is over. In addition, President Trump delivered low inflation rates of 2.1% in 2017, 1.9% in 2018, 2.3% in 2019, and 1.4% in 2020. Ominously, inflation soared from about 2% to 6.2% in the first nine months of the Biden Administration, hurting low-income Americans the most.

Inflation soared during the first nine months of the Biden Administration because of the passage of three massive spending bills and because the Biden Administration sold out U.S. energy independence for the fig leaf of the Green Revolution, which relies heavily on highly unreliable and unstable sources of energy that depend on weather patterns. Such reliance costs human lives, as more than 200 people died because of the state of Texas’ dependence on windmills that froze during cold weather.

President Biden has argued strenuously that we must put the bad economic and inflation numbers that he has achieved in perspective. Putting those numbers in perspective by looking at the Trump Administration shows beyond question that the Biden Administration has delivered on its promise to make things worse for virtually all Americans. At the end of the day, the American people are entitled to conclude that, once again, President Biden has no idea what he is saying.