Refusing to take responsibility for the dramatic domestic price increases of the last year, President Biden insisted Tuesday that his administration’s policies are alleviating rather than exacerbating inflation.
“I think our policies help not hurt. Think about what they say. The vast majority of the economists think that this is going to be a real tough problem to solve but it’s not because of spending,” Biden told reporters during a press briefing on the economy.
Despite the explosion of fiscal stimulus passed since Biden took office, such as the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill, which many economists have said fueled inflation, he dodged on the inflationary consequences of his unprecedented spending and instead blamed the supply chain crisis and Republicans in Congress.
Production and shipping delays triggered by the pandemic are still plaguing the country, Biden suggested, which his administration has addressed by bringing together labor and industry to “improve operations at the port, to speed up the transfer of products from abroad to the location where they’re going to be used.”
As for the trucker shortage preventing the timely delivery of lumber and other goods, Biden said he has executed a plan “to get more truckers on the job.” And in some industries, such as internet services and meat processing, which he claimed lack competition, his administration is supposedly “helping smaller companies get into the game to bring down overall prices.”
“Easing these bottlenecks and making these supply-chains secure is a major focus of my economic strategy,” Biden stated.
He reiterated that he has proposed a minimum tax for billionaires and corporations, which he believes will play a major role in solving inflation. Meanwhile, “the GOP proposes raising taxes on teachers and firefighters,” he claimed.
“They’ve got it backwards,” he said. Biden proclaimed that the key to tempering inflation is to “make sure big corporations pay their fair share.”
Referring to the GOP plan to “rescue America” spearheaded by chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Senator Rick Scott in February, Biden claimed Republicans “don’t want to solve inflation by lowering your costs, they want to raise your taxes and lower your income.” In the plan, Scott loosely pitched that “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.”
Last month, Washington Post fact-checkers rated Biden’s claim that congressional Republicans want to raise taxes on middle class families and small business owners “mostly false” with three Pinnochios, meaning it contained “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”
“Not a single other Republican in Congress has embraced Scott’s specific tax proposal,” the Post noted, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that it didn’t represent the Republican agenda in March.
On the issue of gas prices specifically, which broke a new record high Tuesday, Biden claimed that the GOP “plan is to give oil companies a free pass,” accusing them of sitting on unused leases, which could be tapped to produce more oil and relax the energy supply crunch, “while shipping record profits back to their investors.” He assured viewers that under his leadership, “U.S. oil and gas production is reaching record levels,” saying more energy was produced domestically in his first year than during his predecessor’s entire tenure.
However, from the first day of his presidency, the Biden administration took immediate executive action to obstruct domestic energy production, replacing it with climate conscious policy, driving price increases at the gas pump long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which further strained energy markets. Biden has attributed much of soaring inflation to “Putin’s price hike.”
On his first day in office, Biden’s Department of the Interior suspended the authority of local Bureau of Land Management offices to approve leases, drilling permits, and mining operations plans that would expand America’s oil supply. A few months later, the suspension of local authorities was extended indefinitely by political appointee Laura Daniel Davis, making the fate of all future leasing and drilling permits dependent on her personal approval.
Rather than reassure Americans that his administration would finally be utilizing the abundant U.S. natural resources and oil reserves to reduce dependency on foreign oil from Russia and other autocratic adversaries, Biden touted his administration’s investments to build a “clean energy future.”