Despite all of the terrible optics and even their normally loyal soldiers in the mainstream media starting to report on it, you almost have to give some credit to the Biden administration in general and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in particular. (And that’s a difficult sentence to type, trust me.) No matter how high prices go or how stubbornly inflation refuses to come down, she dutifully steps up to the microphone each week to assure that country that it’s all in their minds and things are going simply wonderfully. Then she seems to have her feelings hurt and looks disappointed when people don’t fall for it. That happened again yesterday when KJP attempted to serve up another helping of praise for the wonders of Bidenomics. But as our colleague Katie Pavlich reports at Townhall, the effort fell flat when the Press Secretary stumbled while attempting to answer some of the most basic questions about the economy.
Speaking to reporters at the White House Monday, Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre touted the “success” of the Biden economy. She then had trouble answering a basic question about why Americans aren’t buying what she’s selling.
When President Trump was in office, inflation was .7 percent. Today, it’s still near 4 percent. Costs for everyday household items, energy and food are still through the roof.
“After years of inflation, US consumers are shouldering a burden unlike anything seen in decades — even as the pace of price increases has slowed. It now requires $119.27 to buy the same goods and services a family could afford with $100 before the pandemic. Since early 2020, prices have risen about as much as they had in the full 10 years preceding the health emergency,” Bloomberg reports.
In her effort to “explain” how Biden’s policies have been such a great “success,” KJP literally told one of the most obvious, bare-faced lies of this administration, which is a low bar to duck under. She said that when Biden took office, “the economy was in a tailspin… because of the last administration, because of the Trump administration.” It takes some serious cojones to say something like that in front of the White House press corps. When Joe Biden was sworn in, even a year into the pandemic, the economy was still running in high gear. You can complain about Donald Trump’s rants and mannerisms or the mean tweets all you like, but it was Joe Biden’s policies that ran this economy into a wall at record speeds.
Just to offer an example of precisely how wrong KJP is on this topic, check out some of these easy-to-check figures from the RNC.
BIDEN: "Wages for working families have gone up while inflation has come down 65%!"
Prices have gone up by 17.6% since Biden took office, while real wages have declined by 3%. pic.twitter.com/fFhHN1ZQ56
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 27, 2023
Do these people honestly think that Americans are incapable of noticing what’s going on all around them? Groceries are up 25% since January 2020 while the price of used cars has risen 35% in the same period. Apartment rentals cost significantly more and insurance continues to rise steadily. Food, gasoline, and other common necessities still all cost a lot more now than when Joe Biden rode into town.
If prices are coming down at all this winter (and they are in some cases), they are only declining from the previous, even higher costs that showed up once Biden took charge. Here’s some more from that Bloomberg report mentioned above where they examine prices today versus when Donald Trump was leaving office. Indoor plants: up 21%. Groceries: up 25%. Restaurant food: up 24%. Electricity: up 25%. Natural gas: up 29%.
The list goes on and we could keep listing all of the things that are less affordable now for paragraphs, but you get the point. All of this badness was driven by government policy. It didn’t just happen by accident. Inflation has now come down somewhat from its peak under Biden, but it’s still around four percent and economists are warning that it could start climbing again after the holidays. During Donald Trump’s final month in office, inflation was at 0.7%.
There’s an old saying about not peeing on my leg and telling me it’s raining. Joe Biden’s team doesn’t want him to have to take responsibility for the terrible results of his policies, particularly heading into an election year, and that’s understandable. Politicians always want to find a way to shift the blame. But they need to put in at least some minimal effort to come up with a pitch that won’t be immediately knocked out of the park. Trying to claim that Donald Trump wrecked the economy is simply beyond the pale and KJP is rightly being mocked for this dump truck load of malarkey.
