Democrats this week touted their theme of “joy” at their convention, which took place in Chicago this week, but there is nothing joyful about Americans having to pay 14 percent more for airfare in the Biden-Harris America.
According to data from the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the cost of airfare has increased 14 percent since both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris — the latter of whom has been coronated as the top of the ticket candidate, shirking the will of 14 million voters who cast their ballot for Biden — in January 2021.
CHART — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Release: Consumer Price Index:
In March 2022, one year into the Biden-Harris administration, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian warned that airlines’ U.S. ticket prices could increase between five and 10 percent, coinciding with the price of oil climbing.
The extra fuel costs comprised “probably about $25 on a ticket, that could be anywhere between 5% to 10% at these high levels of oil … and international [flights] will be a bit higher than that,” Bastian told the BBC at that time.
Later that same year, the price of a one-way ticket between the two major metropolitan areas in California skyrocketed to $700.
Bizarrely, the following year, in 2023, President Joe Biden actually bragged about the prices of gas and air travel under his watch, despite the fact that both soared. In fact, the gas price average hit a record high under Biden and Harris’s watch.
““You know, from turkey, to air travel, to a tank of gas, costs went down,” Biden claimed. “They went down.”
Those claims, as Breitbart News reported at the time, were absolutely not true.
Further, as Breitbart News’s Business Digest explains, Harris is a key figure behind these inflationary policies that are continuing to batter American families:
Harris, of course, was right there in the thick of it, casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate for some of the most ambitious—and let’s face it, inflationary—spending bills in recent history. The American Rescue Plan, that $1.9 trillion behemoth, was touted as a lifeline for a struggling nation. What it became, instead, was the accelerant for an inflationary blaze that’s been impossible to extinguish.
The Biden administration, with Harris as its loyal lieutenant, was quick to spend but slow to consider the consequences. Sure, there were plenty of global factors—supply chain disruptions, a war in Ukraine, the pandemic’s long tail, labor shortages—but let’s not kid ourselves. The inflation we’re seeing today didn’t just happen. It was, in many ways, engineered.
…
Now, as Harris hits the campaign trail, she’s talking tough on price gouging and promising relief. But it’s hard to take these pledges seriously when they come from someone who was instrumental in creating the very conditions that led to today’s inflationary woes. It’s a bit like the arsonist offering to help put out the fire.
Former President Donald Trump, on the other hand, is offering a different economic future, vowing to “end the era of inflation, mayhem, and misery” while also connecting these policies, sparking runaway inflation, directly to Harris.
“Kamala has declared that tackling inflation will be a day one priority. Think about it. For her, day one was three-and-a-half years ago,” Trump said. “She says her plan is going to bring down prices. Why didn’t you do it? You’ve been there three-and-a-half years.”
RELATED — Karine Jean-Pierre: No “Daylight” Between Biden and Harris on Policy:
On the campaign trail, Trump promised Americans that if they choose him, “incomes will soar, your savings will grow, young people will be able to afford a home, and we’ll bring back the American dream better and stronger than ever before,” undoing much of the damage inflicted by the Biden-Harris administration through a variety of means — from slashing regulatory burdens to cutting energy prices and bringing supply chains back home to U.S. soil.