Fact Check 17: Consumer price inflation under Biden-Harris has been more than three times higher than under Trump-Pence
Fact Check 17: Consumer price inflation under Biden-Harris has been more than three times higher than under Trump-Pence
This fact should be common knowledge, 14 days away from the election, but it isn't. Why?
Preface: See 2024 Fact Check: Introduction and link-list
Sources
How The Economy Really Fared Under Biden/Harris And Trump—From Jobs To Inflation, Forbes, September 10, 2024. Excerpt:
Inflation has been far worse during the Biden administration, up 19% over the first 42 months of Biden’s term compared to 6% during Trump’s first 42 months, according to the government’s consumer price index.
Biden's big inflation problem: Prices are now up nearly 20% since he took office, Yahoo Finance, May 16, 2024. Excerpt:
The cumulative price increase has been a GOP focus for months, and that continued Wednesday as new data showed the tally inching ever closer to a psychologically significant milestone of 20%.
Fact check: Biden again falsely claims inflation was 9% when he became president, CNN Politics, CNN, May 14, 2024.
For the second time in less than a week, President Joe Biden falsely claimed Tuesday that the inflation rate was 9% when he began his presidency.
Biden was criticized by many Republicans, including former president and current presidential rival Donald Trump, for telling CNN in an interview last Wednesday: “No president’s had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% percent when I came to office, 9%.”
Biden repeated the claim about the inflation rate, albeit in slightly vaguer form, in a Tuesday interview with Yahoo Finance. This time, he said: “I think inflation has gone slightly up. It was at 9% when I came in, and it’s now down around 3%.”
Biden’s claim that the inflation rate was 9% when he became president is not close to true. The year-over-year inflation rate in January 2021, the month of his inauguration, was about 1.4%. The Biden-era inflation rate did peak at about 9.1% – but that peak occurred in June 2022, after Biden had been president for more than 16 months. The March 2024 inflation rate, the most recent available rate at the time Biden made these comments, was about 3.5%, up from about 3.2% the month prior.
In other words, Biden’s claims make it sound like inflation is much lower today than it was when he was inaugurated – but it is actually higher, though there has been a steep decline since the June 2022 peak. (That peak followed Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which sparked global increases in energy and food prices.) And while Biden’s claims make it sound like the end of the Trump presidency was plagued by high inflation, inflation was unusually low during Trump’s last months in the White House amid the economic slowdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
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See section 2 in the 2024 Fact Check: Introduction and link-list
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