President Joe Biden’s 40-year-high inflation is here to stay despite the White House claiming for months that rising costs were “temporary, transitory.”
“Inflation is pushing prices higher and higher, and some of those costs may never come back down to the levels Americans were accustomed to before the pandemic,” Axios reported Monday. [T]he good old days of cheap goods, and even cheaper services, may be long gone.”
“Gas, food and other consumer prices have soared, with no end in sight,” the article added.
Biden’s inflation will reportedly cost consumers an extra $5,200 in 2022, or $433 per month. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, inflation already cost consumers an estimated $3,500 in 2021, impacting low-income families the hardest.
Last year, White House press secretary Jen Psaki stated that Biden’s inflation would only be “temporary” and “transitory.”
“Obviously, our analysis is going to be done by our economic experts. They continue to convey that they believe the impact will be temporary, transitory,” Psaki said in May.
After inflation kept rising, Psaki was asked again in December if she thought inflation was still transitory. “Given what Jerome Powell is now saying, does the administration, does the President acknowledge that inflation is more entrenched and not transitory?” NBC News’s Kristen Welker questioned.
Psaki responded by lengthening the “transitory” timeline into 2022 while suggesting the soaring prices were rooted in the pandemic.
“It [inflation] will ease next year, and that our supply chain issues and higher prices are rooted in the pandemic,” she said.
Biden’s inflation has not eased. Instead, inflation has only become worse and will continue to soar in 2022, Barrons reported. Inflation has become so bad that Goldman Sachs estimated the Federal Reserve has a 35 percent chance of triggering a recession as a result of tightening monetary policy to cool inflation.
“Eleven out of 14 tightening cycles in the U.S. since World War II were followed by a recession within two years, but only eight of them can be even partially attributed to Fed tightening — and soft or ‘softish’ landings have been more common more recently,” Bloomberg reported.
Biden has struggled with messaging on inflation. What was once called “transitory” inflation is now “Putin’s price hike.” Before that shift, CNN labeled inflation “good,” but the Washington Post noted that some reframe it as “corporate greed.”
“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has driven up gas prices and food prices all over the world,” Biden claimed in Iowa last week. “So everything is going up. We saw it in today’s inflation data.”
Biden’s claim that inflation is only a result of Putin’s actions is incorrect. Inflation was climbing well before “Putin’s price hike.”
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter and Gettr @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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