President Joe Biden has repeatedly insisted that the United States has the “fastest-growing economy in the world,” but unless the growth he’s talking about is the inflation percentage increasingly crippling American consumers, he’s extremely wrong.
On top of gas prices teetering on the edge of $5 a gallon on average, a nationwide formula shortage triggered by the government, and an ongoing supply-chain crisis, a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that U.S. consumer inflation reached an 8.6 percent annual rate in May.
Against economists’ overly optimistic predictions about dropping prices, that’s the fastest inflation has risen since December 1981 and up 0.3 percent since April. Most of the price bloating in May centered on two of Americans’ most essential living needs: groceries, which increased 11.9 percent since May of 2021, and energy, which increased 34.6 percent from a year earlier. Shelter costs were also up 5.5 percent compared to May of last year.
As a result, consumer confidence is crashing at record speeds. Despite buyers’ concerns about rising prices that are often far steeper than what the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates, the White House is still refusing to acknowledge that the U.S. is in a full-blown economic crisis.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in a press briefing on Tuesday that Biden’s administration believes “the economy is in a better place than it has been historically.”
Jean-Pierre even said that Biden believes his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan actually helped the economy instead of contributing to its problems, a lie that even some members of the corporate media reject.
Biden, of course, still blames Russia’s Vladimir Putin for Americans’ wallet woes. He even penned a lie-riddled op-ed for The Wall Street Journal last week outlining what is supposed to be his plan to fight inflation.
“So, while it’s true that inflation is a complex, multifaceted problem that isn’t entirely any person’s or administration’s or event’s fault, it is fair to say that the Biden administration, from top to bottom, was as wrong as an administration could be on the issue,” Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi wrote in a recent column. “They ignored it. They weren’t prepared. They exacerbated it. At the very least, Biden deserves a lot more credit for inflation than he does economic growth. If you’re going to take credit for the latter, you deserve blame for the former.”