Another Perspective on Biden's Inflation Problem

 From Slate's The Pandemic Election by Zachary D. Carter:

Neither assessment is quite right. Voters did indeed reject Kamala Harris over frustration with the Biden economy, but voters across the world are throwing out incumbents due to outrage over a very broad array of economic conditions. In Japan, inflation barely raised its head after the pandemic, and yet the reigning conservative government just took its biggest electoral hit in decades as its economy slips in and out of recession. The German economy hasn’t grown since the pandemic, and voters appear ready to oust the ruling center-left coalition as soon as they can. The U.K. is on its fourth prime minister since the pandemic and seems eager for a fifth.

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The Wall Street Journal lays out the standard conservative case against Biden, citing his $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill from early 2021 as the original sin that condemned Democrats to failure. But the Journal’s own numbers tell a different story, attributing only 0.6 percent of the total inflationary surge across 2021 and 2022 to Biden’s spending package. Inflation peaked in the summer of 2022 at 9.1 percent, meaning Biden barely added anything to the overall path of prices—a finding consistent with the prevailing consensus among economists. “The bottom line is that inflation’s rise and fall reflected primarily global drivers,” the International Monetary Fund concluded in September. Absent Biden’s stimulus, growth would have been weaker, unemployment higher, and wages lower—but prices would have been maddeningly high anyway.

If you want to blame Biden for inflation, you should ask yourself why you think this is so.

You might want to consider what it would be like if we had a recession with massive unemployment and wages stagnating.

sch 11/25