Biden Lied, Your Wallet Died
President Joe Biden’s retelling of economic history could win a fiction award. He recently claimed in an interview that inflation “was 9% when I came into office,” even though it was 1.4% at that time. Not only is Biden lying 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%. 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%. In June 2022 alone, the consumer price index rose 1.2%, an increase almost as large as the entire year before Biden took office. What caused prices to rise about as fast in a single month as they had over the course of a whole year? In a word, “Bidenomics.” The president’s multitrillion-dollar spending spree has been paid for with borrowed money, lent by the Federal Reserve that dutifully created that cash out of nothing. The result was trillions of dollars in new money without a commensurate increase in the size of the economy. That reduced the value of each individual dollar—a phenomenon we call inflation—and prices rose at the fastest rate in four decades. It’s difficult to overstate just how disastrous is Biden’s record on inflation and what a baldfaced lie it is to claim inflation was 9% when he was inaugurated, not a year and a half later. Some historical context illustrates the point.
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