President Joe Biden’s retelling of economic history could win a fiction award.
He recently claimed in an interview that inflation “was 9 percent when I came into office,” even though it was 1.4 percent at that time. Not only is Biden wrong about the historical record, but it was his policies that fueled the inflation fire.
The facts are clear: Biden was handed an economy that was recovering at an unprecedented pace. Gross domestic product was rising at an annualized rate of $1.5 trillion. Annual inflation as measured by the consumer price index was 1.4 percent. A monthly average of 1.5 million people were returning to work as lockdowns were lifted.
Just a year and a half later, Biden managed to deliver two consecutive quarters of negative GDP—the traditional definition of a recession—while driving annual inflation up to 9.1 percent. In June 2022 alone, the consumer price index rose 1.2 percent, an increase almost as large as the entire year before Biden took office.
Read Full Article Here
