The White House was forced Wednesday to defend President Joe Biden‘s dubious claim that inflation was at 9% when he took office.
Biden has said so twice now, but in reality, inflation stood at just 1.4% in January 2021. It did reach 9% — in June 2022, when he’d been in office for nearly 18 months. When a reporter brought up the discrepancy, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke to wider forces in the economy.
“The point he was making is that the factors that caused inflation were in place when he walked into the administration,” she said. “The pandemic caused inflation around the world by disrupting our economy and breaking our supply chains.”
The reporter had asked if Biden was deliberately misleading the public or if he just didn’t realize that inflation was at 1.4% when he took office.
“Reopening after the pandemic unavoidably increased inflation by unleashing pent-up demand,” Jean-Pierre continued. “Annualized core CPI [consumer price index] in the second term of 2021 was 9%. So he was talking about the factors that were in place that led to that.”
Inflation has dogged Biden since it began rising in the spring of his first year in office. It surged to 5% by May 2021 and peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 before falling steadily over the last year. But it remains elevated today at 3.4%, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
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Biden first made the 9% claim in an interview with CNN, saying, “No president’s had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office, 9%.” He then repeated a version of it to Yahoo Finance, claiming, “It was at 9% when I came in, and it’s now down around 3%.”
Republicans were happy to point out the error, with former President Donald Trump saying, “Biden’s price hikes are killing the American dream.”
