Over the last year, America suffered the highest inflation in over 40 years, and the highest producer price increases ever. And things could get worse, due to skyrocketing commodity prices: for example, foodstuffs are up over 60% under Biden, notes the Investment Watch blog. The CRB Commodity Index rose 66.6% since Biden took office — from 198.09 when Biden took office to 330.55 this morning.
Higher commodity prices today mean higher consumer prices down the road. As Investopia notes, “Commodity prices are believed to be a leading indicator of inflation.”
This persistently high inflation debunks Biden’s claim that the spike in inflation would be “transitory” and temporary.
While prices are going up, people’s savings are shrinking. Their savings accounts are earning interest rates of less than 1%, which fails to keep pace with an inflation rate of over 8%. Effectively, people’s savings accounts are losing more than 7% of their value each year.
People’s retirement accounts, which almost always are invested in the stock market or mutual funds that invest in stock, are shrinking, too. The stock market fell last week for the seventh consecutive week.
This reflected a weak economy: the U.S. economy shrank at a rate of 1.4% in the most recent quarter, reflecting a huge rise in America’s trade deficit. American exports decreased by 9.6%, while imports grew by 17.7%. U.S. productivity dropped at a 7.5% annual rate, the most since 1947.
Inflation is higher in America than it is in Europe. Under Trump, the U.S. economy outperformed Europe, especially during the pandemic year of 2020, when Britain, France and Italy experienced much sharper economic declines than the U.S. The U.S. economy shrank 3.5% in 2020. The economy shrank much more in Europe: 7.9% in France, 9.9% in the United Kingdom, and 8.9% in Italy.
But that has changed under Biden. While America’s economy was shrinking recently, France’s economy was growing in 2022, and France’s inflation rate is lower than America’s. A finance professor describes the current era in the U.S. as “The Biden stagflation,” combining high inflation with economic stagnation.
Biden’s policies caused inflation, according to even Democratic economists like Larry Summers and Obama advisor Steven Rattner. As Rattner noted in the New York Times, Biden has spent “an unprecedented amount” of taxpayer money, which resulted in “too much money chasing too few goods.”
To deal with the high inflation of the Biden era, Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) suggested a tax increase. But raising taxes would also likely shrink the economy and deepen the coming recession that many economists predict.
The economy is already hampered by Biden Administration policies that discourage work, reward idleness, and make it harder for companies to attract employees. Biden enacted policies that reduced the size of America’s private-sector workforce and made America less economically competitive.
