Bernstein: I’ve Never Seen an Administration That’s Done More to Lower Inflation than Biden

Monday, White House Council of Economic Advisers member Jared Bernstein touted the Biden administration’s efforts to lower inflation.

Bernstein said he has “never been part of an administration that has tried to do more to help working households” combat the rising prices.

“[F]irst of all, you said if the administration isn’t doing enough to help ease inflationary pressures. I guess different people who have different answers of enough,” Bernstein stated. “But I’ve never been part of an administration that has tried to do more to help working households get by in this period of elevated prices. Our work in the ports, container dwell time, something I never talked about until I got to this round of, of the CEA container dwell time is down by about 50%, shelves are generally well-stocked, I mentioned the labor supply story. When you get to issues of industry competition, that’s obviously something the president has actually leaned into pretty fulsomely. The idea is less about price gouging and more just about simple Econ 101. Look, if there’s insufficient competition in an industry, price levels are going to be higher there, and we see lots of evidence of that.”

“So, what we’d like to see is a lot less barrier to entry in some of our key industries,” he added. “Now on student debt, here’s something people also don’t know enough about. This administration working with our Education Department, has already provided $18 billion in student debt relief, reaching almost 800,000 people, people who were defrauded by for-profit colleges, people who maybe became disabled and thereby couldn’t pay back their loan the same way, people who got public service loan forgiveness. We are working diligently to try to do all we can to ameliorate that pressure as well.”

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