Pete Buttigieg, President Joe Biden‘s secretary of transportation, was recently asked about high inflation and the worsening state of the U.S. economy. In response, he spun a lovely tale.
“Remember, we have our challenges right now,” Buttigieg admitted on ABC’s This Week. “But when the president took office, we were facing an economy that was at risk of going into free fall. The American Rescue Plan stopped that.”
NEARLY HALF OF VOTERS WILL VOTE REPUBLICAN AS ECONOMY AND INFLATION TOP CONCERNS: POLL
Buttigieg seems to be suffering from long-term memory loss. That’s no great tragedy given that his current position doesn’t require any skills or effort. Fortunately for him, however, there are entire government agencies that do nothing but keep statistics about the economy, so we can remind him about the time when Biden took office.
Biden inherited a booming economy amid a rapid post-pandemic recovery. Far from being fragile and on the edge of collapse, the economy of that time was in excellent shape. All it needed, after all the pandemic spending of the prior nine months, was a bit of fiscal restraint, which Biden proved unable to deliver.
Real gross domestic product, the first quarter data now tell us, had recovered its pre-pandemic levels at roughly the time Biden was giving his inaugural address. Unemployment, which had spiked to 15% at the onset of the pandemic, had come all the way back down to 6% when Biden climbed up onto the dais. Already, about 13 million of the 21 million jobs that had been lost overnight to COVID had been restored. Wages had spiked for low-income workers as employers struggled to get people to come back on the job. Inflation was still very low that month, at 1.4% annualized. The S&P 500 stock index had already surpassed its pre-pandemic highs, clocking in above 3,800 after 10 months of nearly uninterrupted growth.
Best of all, COVID vaccines had just been developed in record time by the Trump administration and were already being administered when Biden took the oath. This meant that state and local governments could — and most did — safely drop pandemic restrictions and let businesses reopen.
Does that sound like the dire situation Buttigieg was describing? An economy teetering on the edge of collapse? Of course it doesn’t. The post-COVID economy was strong, well on its way to building itself back. All Biden had to do was get out of the way. Instead, he passed the predictably inflationary American Rescue Plan, and the rest is history. Inflation rocketed from below 2% to 7.5% the following January. It was 8.2% last month, and it still isn’t going down.
The White House now finds itself desperate to make the past seem worse and the present seem less bad. Biden now says in public that the economy is “strong as hell,” whatever that means. Then again, his handlers had to walk back recent comments (something they have to do regularly) about a possible “slight recession,” so scared is his political team of the dreaded R-word.
Yet despite an unprecedented media effort to prevent anyone from admitting that the United States is already in recession — there were two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, after all — most people actually understand that the economy is in bad shape, and they blame Biden for it.
More than 60% disapprove of Biden’s performance on the economy, according to recent surveys by both Fox News and Harvard-Harris. More than 70% believe that Biden’s policies are responsible for the current state of the economy, according to a recent CBS News survey, which 65% believe is getting worse.
Why do people think that? Because gas prices in some states are north of five bucks a gallon again. Because both overall inflation and core inflation haven’t been this bad since the Reagan era and inflation is devouring paychecks and bank balances. Because the S&P 500 is back down below where it was when Biden took office in January 2021 and people rightly fear that they may have to put off retirement as a consequence. Because although the employment situation remains good for the moment, persistent high inflation will force the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates dramatically to get inflation back to a manageable level, which won’t be good for the job market.
If Biden were doing a better job, his functionaries wouldn’t have to talk down the amazing economy he inherited while talking up today’s economy in a way nobody finds credible. Buttigieg should probably find something more useful to do, like combating “racist roads” or something, than try to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.
