President Joe Biden is employing a familiar campaign strategy to spin the September consumer price index report, which outpaced projections and showed core inflation hitting a 40-year high.
The president frequently implores voters to compare him to the “alternative” and not the “almighty,” and he sought to insulate his economic record by telling a crowd in Los Angeles Thursday that should Republicans take control of Congress come November, “Inflation is going to get worse. It’s that simple.”
INFLATION WORSE THAN EXPECTED AT 8.2% IN FINAL PRE-ELECTION REPORT
Yearly inflation ending in September registered 8.2%, according to the September report published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Core inflation, which factors out energy and food prices, rose to 6.6%, the highest mark since 1982. Both figures came in above projections.
Biden opened his Thursday remarks, delivered at an event touting “how the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law investments are helping,” by tearing into Republicans, including National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Rick Scott and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), for vowing to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and threatening funding for Medicare and Medicaid with yearly authorizations.
“I just couldn’t disagree more with my Republican friends who say the biggest problem on our economy right now is that working folks are making too much money,” the president stated. “Workers are making too much money and too many people are working. Too many jobs are being filled. I think that’s a bunch — as we already said — a bunch of malarkey.”
With just weeks left before the midterm elections, Biden and other national Democrats have escalated rhetoric attacking Republicans by seeking to tie them to former President Donald Trump and accusing the “ultra MAGA” economic platform of cutting costs for wealthy Americans at the expense of working families.
White House officials specifically voiced concern to the Washington Examiner about more than 1,200 prescription drugs that saw price increases outpace the CPI rate between 2021-2022 before being capped by the Inflation Reduction Act. Officials say that should Republicans take back Congress and make good on their vow to repeal said legislation, those “unchecked’ prices would resume, increasing the costs of health care for American families.
Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, similarly echoed Biden’s Thursday comments
“We don’t have to guess how Republicans want to sell out American families — they’ve repeatedly made clear that they want to gut Social Security and Medicare and even increase prescription drug costs for millions of Americans,” he said in a statement. “Time and time again, Republicans have shown they will side with special interests to raise costs on American families, while President Biden and Democrats work tirelessly to lower costs. The stakes of this fall’s elections could not be higher.”
Republicans, on the other hand, took issue with Biden’s Thursday comments.
Biden, both speaking in California and in a statement released earlier that day, acknowledged that “Americans are squeezed by the cost of living” but claimed his economic policies have driven down quarterly inflation to an annualized rate of 2%, compared to 11% the previous quarter.
One GOP official accused the White House of “cherry-picking statistics” to fill that claim.
“Over the summer, all Biden wanted to talk about was core inflation,” that person fumed. “Now that core is rising again, all they want to talk about is the headline number. To quote Joe Biden: ‘What a bunch of malarkey.’ The American voters can see through this sham and will make Democrats pay come November.”
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You can watch Biden’s remarks in full below.
