Despite President Joe Biden recently lauding his economic record, many Americans have faced intense financial pressures during his presidential term.
Biden touted his economic legacy in a Tuesday speech at the Brookings Institution, claiming that America had “entered a new phase of our economic resurgence.” The president also referred to the U.S. economy as “the best economy, strongest economy in the world” during his speech.
“But all kidding aside, I came into office with a different vision for America that’s been consistent with my record — good, bad, or indifferent — since I’ve been a senator: grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up; invest in America and American products,” Biden said Tuesday.
“You know, four years later, we have proof that the playbook is, at least now, working.” Biden added later in the speech.
The U.S. economy has been riddled with inflation and high costs under the Biden-Harris administration. Because of this, many Americans are not buying the rosy picture of the U.S. economy that the president painted, as they have repeatedly expressed discontent over the growing cost of living since Biden took office, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Inflation is a tax, and one that hits everyone,” Peter Earle, senior economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told the DCNF. “It affects the poor, it affects business owners, and it affects the working class, and the wealthy. It discourages saving, pushing people toward consumption they may rather not be making. And it clouds the ability to plan economically, as with prices rising at different rates budgets can easily become unbalanced.”
“But that’s not all that made it a critical issue for Americans,” Earle added. “A closely related factor is that the Biden administration and its henchmen lied constantly about it, even to an extent that made its own supporters cringe. Americans were told that the rising prices were caused by Vladimir Putin, gas station owners, greed, and ocean shippers, among others. We were told that inflation was worse everywhere else in the world, which was absurd a lie as any. And in one of his last gasps in the Oval Office Biden actually attempted to convince beleaguered Americans that inflation was over 9% when he came into office. So while the damage that rising prices did was profound, the lies convinced Americans that the Biden administration was more interested in lying about it than addressing it.”
Much of the president’s four-year term has been marred by stubborn inflation, which has eased some since its peak of 9.1% in June 2022. That year, the White House repeatedly blamed rising inflation and surging gas prices on Russian President Vladimir Putin following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Biden labeling high gas prices at the time as a “Putin price hike.”
Some energy experts raised concerns over Biden’s decision to release oil from the strategic petroleum reserve ahead of the 2022 midterm elections to provide temporary relief from high prices, noting that the move could have put the U.S. in a vulnerable position as tensions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East continued to rise. Under the Biden-Harris administration, U.S. oil production has seen record highs, despite Biden previously pledging to end drilling on public lands.
“The Biden administration has pushed basically two things that are both disastrous for the economy,” Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF. “They’ve pushed massive increases in government spending, which is really a form of wealth redistribution from productive industries to endeavors and industries favored by the president, by politicians, by unelected bureaucrats … The other one, of course, is the Biden administration’s tremendous increases in regulation which has prevented the economy and prevented workers and business owners from actually coming together to efficiently produce the goods and services that they want to enjoy.”
The rate of inflation ticked up slightly in November, with the consumer price index (CPI), a broad measure of the price of everyday goods, climbing by 2.7%, according to a Wednesday report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. November’s increase in CPI met expectations but was higher than the 2.6% increase in October.
Some economists argue that excessive government spending under the Biden-Harris administration has further fueled inflation. The current administration has often leaned into high government spending, such as with the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act — the latter being criticized as a “massive down payment on the Green New Deal” that failed to lower prices.
During his presidency, Biden imposed $1.7 trillion in new regulations as of Dec. 13 since his inauguration in January 2021, an analysis from the American Action Forum found. Under Biden, the national debt exceeded $36.13 trillion as of Monday, and the federal budget deficit amounted to $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2024, which ended on Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Since taking office, the Biden-Harris administration has approved over $175 billion in student debt relief and allocated well over $100 billion to Ukraine amid its ongoing conflict with Russia.
“I think of some of his [Biden’s] policies as having been completely ill-informed, bullheaded in the wrong way, and having created disastrous burdens on the American public,” Stern told the DCNF. “We have centuries of information to look at to see that when a government recklessly spends and prints money and causes inflation, the people that feel the burden from that are average Americans. And we’ve seen that both in the U.S., we’ve seen that across the world as well, and we’ve seen that across our human history.”
“I think any realistic assessment of his [Biden’s] economic legacy is going to be that he willfully and recklessly copied those historically failed economic policies,” Stern added.
Basic necessities and kitchen staples have increased in price as well, causing many Americans to struggle to afford groceries in recent years. Americans spent an average of 11.2% of their disposable personal income on food in 2023, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Food also accounted for 12.9% of total household expenditures in the U.S. in 2023, according to the USDA.
Inflation has notably robbed many young Americans of milestone opportunities such as purchasing a first home, with the median sales price of houses in the U.S. rising from $327,900 in the third quarter of 2020 to 420,400 in the third quarter of 2024, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data.
The economy was a top issue for many registered voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election, with 52% saying it is “extremely important” and 38% of voters rating the economy as “very important” to driving their votes, according to a Gallup poll published Oct 9.
“To the extent that Biden sought to create massive government spending programs, subsidize unproven technologies, and create postmodern policy initiatives and regulations – all of which generated trillions in debt and huge budget deficits – it [Biden’s economic agenda] has been a resounding success,” Earle told the DCNF.
“The economic and personal finance duress facing most Americans today is unlike anything since the 1970s,” Earle added.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Official White House Photo by Erin Scott)
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