“This is the lie that got us inflation,” Breitbart Economics Editor John Carney said in response to President Joe Biden’s remarks on Wednesday touting his administration’s spending policies and dodging any blame for inflation.
Carney appeared on Larry Kudlow’s eponymously named Fox Business show on Wednesday following Biden’s first press conference after Tuesday’s midterm elections. Kudlow opened the discussion by inviting a fact-check of Biden’s claims about the state of the economy.
“You heard Mr. Biden,” Kudlow said, listing off the president’s claims: “The economy was reeling when he came into office. He is rebuilding it. He is putting together Silicon Valley semiconductor bailouts, Green New Deal bailouts. We going to have high paying jobs. Inflation was Vladimir Putin’s problem.”
“This is the lie that got us inflation,” Carney countered. “They said the economy was in ruins. We needed trillions of new spending in order to rescue the economy—when we were already coming back! The fact that they’re still telling me this lie makes me very glad that the Republicans captured at least one [chamber] of Congress because we can put a stop to the overspending that this lie generated through the inflation.”
FreedomWorks economist Steve Moore also chimed in to call out Biden’s claim that he inherited a poor economy from former President Donald Trump and that inflation is an international problem unconnected to Biden’s policies.
“There are five countries in the world that have lower inflation rates than ours,” Moore said. “And so many of these other countries are pegged to the dollar. So, when we have inflation, they have inflation too. One and a half percent inflation when Trump left office, eight and a half percent inflation [now] — that should be the close of the argument.”
Carney also called out the Biden administration’s tactic of avoiding blame for their inflationary policies by calling inflation “an international problem.”
“This is a deep lie because one of the reasons it is an international problem is [because all these countries] followed the same playbook,” he explained. “They all adopted this ‘we need to just spend, spend, spend’ [agenda], and that’s why it’s an international problem. It doesn’t excuse the Biden administration. And then he claims, ‘Oh we’re doing better.’ Well yeah, we’re doing better because we tightened earlier than other countries. They waited too long.”
Kudlow asked Carney what a potential incoming Republican majority in Congress should do to combat high inflation and a falling economy.
“One thing they need to do is put forward a growth agenda. We need to grow our way out of inflation. We can’t just have only Fed tightening,” Carney said.
He then cited Jude Wanniski’s classic 1974 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “It’s Time to Cut Taxes,” which championed the supply-side economic policies later adopted by President Reagan to tackle inflation.
“What does the U.S. need to do? It needs to have another pro-growth agenda. I think it’s not just tax cuts. We also need to have energy abundance once again,” Carney concluded.
