It’s hard to pick out a single issue that has defined Joe Biden’s tenure as president. The choices can be overwhelming when so many are going wrong. Is it the complete collapse of America’s foreign policy, helping lead a Russian invasion of Europe? Is it the president’s draconian COVID-19 approach that led to more people dying on his watch (with vaccines available) than the previous president’s? Perhaps it’s the rapid rise in violent crime or the humanitarian crisis on the border?
All of those are worthy contenders, but as the saying goes, “it’s the economy, stupid.” I believe no issue has hit the White House harder than the inflationary boom the nation is currently experiencing. Inflation rose to an alarming 7.5% in February. But even this number is misleadingly low. Year-over-year, prices for more common products such as groceries and energy rose much higher.
That reality has left the Biden administration scrambling, and Jen Psaki thinks she’s come up with a new talking point.
This is a fabrication.
Psaki: The numbers measuring inflation are down from month to month pic.twitter.com/OfwOxVz41G
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 9, 2022
However, does Psaki lie, like the RNC claims? The short answer is no, she’s not. Rather, she’s engaging in a bit of sleight of hand meant to obscure the real costs of inflation for American consumers. Let’s break it down, and since I mercifully haven’t had to write on COVID-19 in a while, let’s use it as an example because I think it perfectly illustrates Psaki’s dishonesty.
You can measure everything about coronavirus in terms of peaks or valleys. The rate at which cases increase as you get closer to the COVID-19 peak will naturally slow down. The rate at which cases are increasing eventually slows as the wave approaches its peak. But, as a rational person would not look at the plateauing in the rate at which things increase from the peak to say it’s better than when they were. The peak is, objectively speaking, COVID-19’s worst point, as far as the current wave is concerned.
That’s what Psaki is doing here. She’s not technically lying in that the month-over-month inflation increases have plateaued (the rate was 0.6% in Dec. and Jan., after a high of 0.9% in October). Yet, the implication she’s giving, which is that the overall inflation rate has declined, is not correct. When the Friday numbers come in, it is likely that we will see another record-breaking inflation rate. This could lead to her new clever talking point being utterly ignored.
The total inflation figure, which is calculated year-over-year, is what really matters. It was an incredible 7.5 percent in the last month. That’s how you accurately judge the impact on Americans. A slight decrease in inflationary growth is not something consumers care about. Consumers care only about whether the price of something is higher now than it was a year earlier. Cherry-picking individual month fluctuations is a dishonest game, and Psaki knows exactly what she’s doing.
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