President Joe Biden downplayed the cost-of-living crisis that’s squeezing American households, arguing in a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that inflation over the past several months “hasn’t spiked” and that the monthly rate of inflation was negligible.
Pelley then asked the president what he can do “better and faster” to bring down prices. Biden replied by calling for “perspective” and pointing out that the month-over-month rate of change of inflation was relatively small.
“The inflation rate month to month was just ... an inch, hardly at all,” Biden said.
Biden bristled when pressed about the fact that the annual pace of inflation of 8.3 percent is running close to a multi-decade high.
“I got that,” Biden replied. “But guess what we are. We’re in a position where, for the last several months, it hasn’t spiked. It has just barely ... it’s been basically even.”
The president added that bringing down inflation was going to be a “process” and vowed to “get control of inflation” eventually, including by adopting what he described as pro-growth economic policies like “growing entire new industries,” presumably in the clean-energy domain.
“Under the Trump administration, we had the greatest economy in the history of the world, with no inflation,” Trump said at the Youngstown rally.
“Biden and the Democrat Congress created the worst inflation in 50 years, and that’s going to get a lot worse, because right after the election, when they stopped pumping the oil out of that beautiful strategic reserve that we had, millions and millions of barrels we pumped in, and now they’re pumping it out so that we can keep the prices down a little bit,” Trump said.
The former president also issued a warning regarding Democrats’ tax hikes and the impact on jobs.
“The radical Democrat Congress just passed one of the largest tax hikes in the history of our country, pulverizing the middle class,” Trump said. “It’s going to pulverize your jobs. Wait until you see the numbers starting to come out.”
Biden recently signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes a 15 percent minimum tax on the domestic profits of large American corporations.
“By reducing long-run economic growth, this bill may actually worsen inflation by constraining the productive capacity of the economy,” the team of analysts at the Tax Foundation said in a statement.