Give Heather Boushey credit for working hard to help Joe Biden pass the buck. Boushey, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers, attempts to deflect accountability for a pending recession by citing Vladimir Putin, climate change, and that gosh-darned COVID … which somehow didn’t prevent Biden from claiming economic success in the first few months of his presidency.

This is almost entirely a non-answer to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin question, which is about whether FedEx’s warning about a global recession arriving already is accurate. Sorkin curiously lets it slide:

Asked about FedEx confirming that we’re already in a recession, the Biden Admin’s ⁦@HBoushey⁩ says it’s not their fault, citing Covid, Ukraine, & Puerto Rico losing electricity because of “climate change” pic.twitter.com/e0oCW3YRpJ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 19, 2022

Sorkin may have let it slide, but Joe Kernen didn’t let Boushey off the hook. After painting a rosy image of the economy, Kernen scoffed at the explanation:

“The stock market obviously has all these things wrong,” Kernen said. “That’s a pretty picture that you’ve painted, but it seems like mortgage rates have doubled in the last year, gas prices are still up, probably 60 to 70 percent from where they were before the president took office, inflation’s running at 8.3 percent, 40 year highs —”

“Gas prices have come down phenomenally, Joe,” Bouchey interjected. “You cannot deny that.” …

Bouchey pointed out that gas price hikes can be blamed on a “geopolitical crisis” that “upended” oil markets. According to AAA, the average U.S. gas price sits at approximately $3.67, up from $3.19 a year ago.

“If you’re going to blame everything on the pandemic for inflation, then you’ve got to acknowledge that reopening after the pandemic is why we just got back to basically the job that we had before the pandemic, that 10 million just got us back to even,” Kernen shot back.

The Biden administration wants all of the credit for gas prices coming down — and none of the blame for their increase. As Kernen points out, the official EIA average gas price per gallon across all formulations was $2.454 when Biden took office. It spiked to $5.107 in late June, but even before the invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia, the average gas price was $3.624 — a 47% increase in 13 months. We’re still above that level now at $3.805, a 55% increase over the price of gasoline on Inauguration Day in 2021.

Like I said, though, Boushey did the best she could do with a bad hand. Unfortunately, her boss seems determined to do the worst he can do with the hand he dealt himself:

"Grocery prices were 13.5% higher in August compared with a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is the biggest 12-month jump since March 1979." — Wall Street Journal, today https://t.co/wUbmUKJGDS

— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) September 19, 2022

Duane Patterson has much more on this in his VIP column today, so be sure to read it all.

Has all of this buck-passing had any effect? Tom Elliot also gives us this segment from MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki analysis of a new NBC poll that concludes … nope.

MSNBC's @SteveKornacki: An NBC poll found that by a "2-1 margin, folks say [Biden has] more hurt the economy than helped the economy." pic.twitter.com/7twcL4aqrA

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 19, 2022