Bidenomics tarnished by Bidenflation

Joe Biden is doing his best to tout his 'accomplishments' during his administration. The problem is that he doesn't have any. To wiggle around that annoying fact, Biden's team have told him to take a summertime Bidenomics tour. He's hoping to convince people that Bidenflation is the right elixir for their families' budgets.

The first major mistake of the Bidenomics/Bidenflation tour is his attempt to con families that inflation isn't hurting them. Andy Puzder lays it out like this, saying "The annual inflation rate when Biden took office was 1.4 percent. In May, it was 4 percent, or nearly three times the rate he inherited and still double the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target rate."

The con job is in how the Administration uses the numbers. Notice that the Administration says that "Under the Biden Harris Administration, Inflation Has Fallen." Inflation is still rising. Puzder correctly notes that "Of course, what the Biden team is attempting to take credit for is the decline in the inflation rate from its 9.1 percent peak in June of 2022. The Biden video goes on to claim that 'inflation is less than half what it was last summer.' That claim is misleading for two reasons. First, inflation continues to increase, inflicting greater and greater pain on consumers. Only the rate at which inflation is increasing has slowed."

As Bidenflation continues, it's imperative to shift first from measuring month-to-month inflation rates to year-over-year rates to, finally, cumulative rates. Right now, Bidenflation has increased by 16% since the start of Biden's inauguration. People's wages haven't increased nearly that much in that time.

In fact, since Biden took office, inflation has increased by about 16 percent. If inflation slowed to zero through the rest of Biden’s presidency, that would still be the largest increase for any four-year presidential term since the 1980s — a fact that somehow didn’t make it into the Biden video.

Second, the inflation rate slowed because the Federal Reserve dramatically increased interest rates, not because of any Biden economic policies. In reality, rather than slowing the current inflationary surge, Bidenomics was a primary cause. This surge began the very month Democrats passed Biden’s ironically named $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Prior to the bill’s passage, Larry Summers, the secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, warned that it could "set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation."

And it did.

There are points where Scranton Joe just resorts to outright fabrications. Early in this video, Joe Biden lied:

BIDEN: When I took office, the pandemic was raging and our economy was reeling.

That's a pile of BS. The economy was growing at 6.5% when he took office. As for the pandemic, that had just started a year ago. Did he expect that to just flame out because he took office? Then there's this outright lie:

BIDEN: Today, the U.S. has the leading economic growth rate, leading the world economy since the pandemic, the highest in the world.

Over the last 5 quarters on the books, the U.S. GDP is at 1.1%. In other words, in the first full year of Bidenomics, the U.S. GDP is the size of Trump's last CPI report. Bidenflation is the size of Trump's last quarter of GDP growth. The statistics rattled off in Mr. Kudlow's opening rant says everything:

In summation, Bidenomics is a failure because Biden spent far too much money when the economy was growing, thereby creating Bidenflation. Real family takehome pay is down 3.1% since the start of Biden's term in office. No matter how you say it, that isn't progress. That's going backwards.

To put it differently, too many families run out of paycheck before they run out of bills. People's savings are getting depleted. Credit card debt is rising, too. If that's the definition of Bidenomics, I'll prefer Reaganomics over Bidenomics anytime.