The Patriot Post® · Joe Biden Keeps Lying About the Economy

“I don’t want to hear any more of these lies about reckless spending,” Joe Biden thundered a week ago. “We’re changing people’s lives.” Indeed, he is changing people’s lives … for the worse. And he’s lying about it nonstop.

Biden’s reckless spending in the so-called American Rescue Plan is a huge factor in our present inflation crisis. According to author James Bovard: “Federal Reserve analysts estimated that Biden’s deluge of handouts added 3% to the inflation rate by late last year. The Federal Reserve has boosted the money supply by 40% since the start of the pandemic, helping fuel price surges across the board.”

Meanwhile, the president loves to crow about all those jobs he supposedly created. “We’ve created 8.7 million new jobs in 16 months, an all-time record,” he said shortly before the lie about lies. The reality, of course, is that more than 20 million jobs were killed by shutting down the economy in March 2020. Biden is arbitrarily claiming credit for 8.7 million people returning to work several months after recovery had already started on Donald Trump’s watch.

Biden wants all kinds of credit and thanks for that. But he doesn’t want any blame for the negative effects of his policies. The inconvenient truth is that his recovery, such as it is, has been far more expensive and slower than it should have been.

For example, part of the American Rescue Plan was allocating $350 billion for state and local governments that were not, in fact, all that strapped for cash. Part of the goal was ostensibly to save lots of government jobs. According to a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Through September 2021, we estimate that the federal government allocated $855,000 for each state or local government job-year preserved.” The study’s authors say this yielded “modest if any spillover effects onto the broader economy.”

Journalist Brad Polumbo puts that in perspective: “The feds spent nearly a million bucks for every job they ‘protected’ for a year. (That’s probably about 10 to 8 times as much as these jobs actually pay…) Does that sound like an efficient use of taxpayer money to you?” No, it doesn’t. Polumbo continues, “The federal government wasted hundreds of billions of dollars to protect laughably few government jobs at a wildly inefficient rate with basically zero stimulative effect on the economy.”

Why, it almost seems like that qualifies as “reckless spending” and that Biden is the one who’s lying.

Indeed, when it comes to lies about the economy, Scranton Joe’s got a few. We can’t possibly recount them all here, but take, for instance, his false claim that “since I took office, families are carrying less debt [and] their average savings are up.” Both specifics are exactly the opposite.

Or how about his insistence that inflation “is worse everywhere but here.” That too is false. Among G20 countries, just six of them have inflation rates higher than the U.S. right now.

Think back to his lie last summer that “no serious economist” is talking about long-term inflation. It was a lie then, and it’s especially obtuse in retrospect given that plenty of serious economists predicted exactly this result from Biden’s reckless spending.

Arguably, Biden’s most famous lie right now is the whole “Putin’s price hike” canard. As if inflation hadn’t already careened out of control before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Yes, that invasion caused major supply disruptions of oil and gas, as well as wheat and fertilizer, all of which drive up the price of goods here in America. But no one in their right mind thinks Putin would have invaded if Biden weren’t president, so even the blame Putin deserves doesn’t let Biden off the hook.

Even Democrats aren’t buying Biden’s blame game.

Given Biden’s deceitful track record, what worries us most now is his latest dismissal of recession fears. GDP fell in the first quarter and the second quarter isn’t looking good. Two straight quarters of contraction is technically a recession. Asked by a reporter about predictions that recession “is more likely than ever,” Biden shot back: “Not — the majority of them aren’t saying that. Come on, don’t make things up, OK? Now you sound like a Republican politician. I’m joking. That was a joke.”

“There’s nothing inevitable about a recession,” he added. [Gulp.]

Perhaps veteran political analyst Rich Lowry put it best: “According to Biden, things supposedly are never as bad as they seem, and by the way, even if they are, they are definitely not his fault.”

Maybe someone should tell the president that we don’t want to hear any more of his lies.