Steve Rattner, the lead adviser on former President Barack Obama’s Task Force on the Auto Industry, says President Joe Biden is responsible for historic inflation and skyrocketing gas prices — not Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Rattner, dubbed the “car czar” for his role in crafting the 2009 auto-industry bailout, pushed back on Biden’s assertion Thursday that Putin’s war in Ukraine was largely to blame for the 7.9% inflation rate the United States recorded in February.
WHITE HOUSE EXPECTS INFLATION WILL ‘SUBSTANTIALLY’ INCREASE IN COMING MONTHS
“Well, no,” Rattner tweeted, quoting Biden’s statement. “These are Feb #’s and only include small Russia effect. This is Biden’s inflation and he needs to own it.”
Well, no. These are Feb #’s and only include small Russia effect. This is Biden’s inflation and he needs to own it. https://t.co/WsJjn6picV
— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) March 10, 2022
Rattner and a number of other Obama administration senior officials, including former National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, have consistently warned about the Biden administration’s ability to reverse inflation and lower prices for consumers.
Writing in the New York Times, Rattner heavily criticized Biden for overly blaming supply chain problems for rising prices and being outright “disingenuous” in discussing how much his economic policies, specifically Biden’s now-canned “Build Back Better” social spending legislation, would contribute to the deficit.
“The White House needs to be more honest as it rolls out initiatives. It has promised robust antitrust enforcement, but while that is long overdue, it will have no discernible impact on competition or prices for years. And the high prices of meat and hearing aids, both of which Mr. Biden has vowed to address, are not at the heart of the current problem,” he wrote at the time. ” The Biden administration needs to shift its approach. In particular, with the economy steaming along, it should make deficit reduction as important as its other initiatives.”
“But here again, Mr. Biden has been disingenuous. His Build Back Better plan claims to be deficit neutral, but that assertion is made credible only by using the fuzziest math,” Rattner concluded.
Since announcing his ban on Russian energy imports, Biden and other top White House officials have sought to frame the historic increase in domestic gas prices, up more than 75 cents since Russia invaded Ukraine, as the “Putin spike.”
“A large contributor to inflation this month was an increase in gas and energy prices as markets reacted to Putin’s aggressive actions,” Biden wrote in response to February’s Consumer Price Index report. “As I have said from the start, there will be costs at home as we impose crippling sanctions in response to Putin’s unprovoked war, but Americans can know this: the costs we are imposing on Putin and his cronies are far more devastating than the costs we are facing.”
February’s CPI report saw yearly inflation jump to 7.9%, the highest mark since 1982, that the White House attributed largely to a 3.5% increase in energy prices.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers noted in its response that “there has been substantial run-up in energy prices since February resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine” and that “energy and commodities prices will likely contribute substantially to inflation in the coming months.”
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The White House added that half of the current year-over-year inflation can be attributed to energy, “vehicle-related price increases, and pandemic-affected services.”
