House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that part of what’s behind the sky-high inflation bedeviling American households is due to President Joe Biden’s policies on job creation.
Pelosi said during an Oct. 18 broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that “some” of the inflation in the United States came from “the fact that this president created” millions of jobs. However, she did not specify which of Biden’s policies are behind the lift in job creation.
“Of course, we want to fight inflation. It’s a global issue,” Pelosi said responding to a question about the cost-of-living crunch squeezing American households.
“But some of the inflation in our country sprang from the fact that this president created nearly 10 million—at least 9 million jobs working with the private sector,” she added.
Pelosi remarked that former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan once told her that there’s a link between low unemployment and inflation.
“When you’re talking about inflation, unemployment can be dangerously low. So, they are not unrelated,” Pelosi said, citing the former Fed chair.
The U.S. economy added
263,000 new jobs in September, down from an upwardly revised 537,000 in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the same time, the unemployment rate fell from 3.7 percent in August to 3.5 percent last month.
President Joe Biden took a victory lap following the release of the September jobs data,
telling reporters at the White House on Oct. 7 that, since he came into office, 10 million jobs have been created.
“That’s the fastest job growth at any point of any President in all of American history. Historic progress,” Biden said.
While in those remarks Biden didn’t point to any specific policies that have driven the stated job growth, in a
speech in late September he suggested it was thanks to the passage of the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, which came at a time when the economy was facing “the most anaemic job performance since Herbert Hoover.”
“So we acted quickly, we passed the American Rescue Plan, which set this nation from economic crisis to economic recovery,” Biden said, before adding that, on his watch, nearly 10 million jobs have been created.
“The American Rescue Plan helped keep teachers, police officers, firefighters, first responders on the job,” he continued, adding that the infrastructure bill would also fuel job creation.
While many economists agree that the American Rescue Plan spending—which included $1,400 stimulus checks and expansions to unemployment insurance—made inflation worse, it’s unclear by how much.
A team of economists found in a
recent Fed study that around 60 percent of U.S. inflation was caused by a stimulus-fueled surge in demand, while supply-side bottlenecks made it worse, accounting for the remaining 40 percent.
Steven Rattner, who served as an adviser to the Treasury Secretary under the Obama administration, told CNBC in an
interview in late September that “too much stimulus” by the government and the Federal Reserve is to blame for soaring inflation.
After government data showed inflation in September
came in at 8.2 percent in annual terms, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the top Republican on the House Budget Committee,
pointed to the American Rescue Plan as one of the reasons Americans “are feeling the sticker shock of rising prices every time they visit the grocery store or the gas station.”
Smith said that, under Biden, spending has increased by around $10 trillion.
“Americans are fed up with paying the price for one-party Democrat rule in Washington. In two years, Democrats have added $10 trillion in new spending and left taxpayers holding the bag,” he
said in a statement.
His breakdown for the
spending tally includes over $1 trillion on Biden’s executive actions and $745 billion on the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
