Joe Biden fudges inflation data to shirk ‘any blame’

WASHINGTON — President Biden claimed Friday that he doesn’t bear “any blame” for high inflation because it was “already there” when he took office — despite official data saying otherwise.

“Do I take any blame for inflation? No,” Biden said in response to a reporter’s question after touting a stronger-than-expected January jobs report showing US unemployment at 3.4%, the lowest rate since 1969.

“Why not?” the journalist pressed.

“Because it was already there when I got here, man,” the president claimed.

“Remember what the economy was like when I got here? Jobs were hemorrhaging. Inflation was rising. We weren’t manufacturing a damn thing here. We were in real economic difficulty. That’s why I don’t.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index — the most commonly cited inflation gauge — showed annual inflation at just 1.4% when Biden took office in January 2021 before it soared under his watch to rates unseen since the early 1980s.

Inflation peaked under Biden in June 2022 — with a 9.1% jump in the cost of goods and services over 12 months — before cooling slightly to 6.5% in the latest data from December, which remains higher than at any point since 1982.

In calendar year 2022, the inflation rate was 8% — up from 4.7% in 2021, 1.2% in 2020 and 1.8% in 2019.

Before Biden’s first year, the calendar-year inflation rate hadn’t topped 4% since 1991.

Biden’s critics say that his massive spending over the past two years caused high inflation — though the White House has tried to blame other factors including COVID-19 supply chain issues and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The latest monthly jobs data, showing a growth of 517,000 paid positions, isn’t necessarily good news for inflation and may reflect that the Federal Reserve’s large interest rate hikes have failed to fix the problem — potentially prompting even more hikes, which could freeze investment and trigger a recession.

“Nobody would have expected a number as monstrous as this!” Principal Asset Management chief global strategist Seema Shah said in a note Friday, Yahoo Finance reports. “Is Fed Chair Jerome Powell now wondering why he didn’t push back on the loosening in financial conditions? … it’s even more difficult to see the Fed stop raising rates and entertain ideas of rate cuts when there is such explosive economic news coming in.”

“We now think the Fed is more likely than not to hike in March,” Pantheon Macroeconomics chief economist Ian Shepherdson agreed in a Friday note to clients.

In his remarks on the job growth, however, Biden said he’s confident that “critics and cynics” are wrong and he’s right about the economy.

“Here’s where we stand: The strongest job growth in history, the lowest unemployment rate in 54 years, manufacturing rebounded at a faster rate than in the last 40 years, inflation coming down, real wages going up but moderately going up, not going through the roof, the economy growing at a solid clip,” Biden said.

“Put simply, I would argue the Biden economic plan is working. For the past two years, we’ve heard a chorus of critics write off my economic plan … Well, today’s data makes crystal clear what I’ve always known in my gut: These critics and cynics are wrong.”

Skeptics have heaped blame for inflation on Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that passed in March 2021 without Republican support or revenue offsets. Opponents also question projected revenue in other large spending bills, including Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, which passed in 2021, and last year’s $280 billion bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act and $437 billion environmental and health care bill.

Democratic economic adviser Steven Rattner branded Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus law the “original sin” of the inflation crisis in a New York Times op-ed later that year as consumer costs surged.

“The bill — almost completely unfunded — sought to counter the effects of the Covid pandemic by focusing on demand-side stimulus rather than on investment. That has contributed materially to today’s inflation levels,” wrote Rattner, who managed the Obama Treasury Department’s auto industry bailout.

Another Democratic economic adviser, Larry Summers, who worked as President Barack Obama’s top White House economist and as President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, tried to warn against massive spending in early 2021, but was ignored.

Summers wrote in a February 2021 Washington Post op-ed that Biden’s large stimulus bill could “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.”

“There’s an element in this that the secret sauce of economics is arithmetic,” Summers reflected in a July podcast interview with Politico. “And there were many people in the debate who didn’t do arithmetic … and they thought more stimulus was good, so more stimulus was better, and they didn’t think too much stimulus was really possible.”