Democrats desperately want America’s focus on “affordability” and off Biden’s inflation that caused it. For four years, Democrats’ excessive spending helped stoke inflation that reached a 40-year high. Now, less than a year out of the White House, they want America to believe that their prolonged profligacy isn’t the reason today’s prices remain elevated.
Inflation is a sustained increase in prices. It isn’t caused overnight, and it doesn’t disappear overnight. Once inflation raises prices—and unless the rarity of deflation occurs—they remain relatively high; what makes them eventually return to seeming “normal” is a combination of familiarity and economic growth elevating wages so that purchasing power returns to pre-inflation levels in real economic terms.
During the pandemic, the Federal Reserve pumped liquidity into the economy. At the same time, the Biden administration pumped dollars out of Washington. Then, the Democrats kept pumping out money, even after the pandemic had ended.
Congressional Budget Office data for fiscal years 2021 through 2024 show just how profligate Democrats were. Over those four fiscal years, Democrats ran $7.5 trillion in deficits. However, even this enormous sum obscures the true extent of Biden’s and the Democrats’ spending surge.
Compared to 2019, pre-COVID (a year when federal spending had already increased 8 percent), Democrats spent $8.2 trillion over this level during 2021-2024. The only reason Democrats didn’t spend more was that some of their own senators refused to support it.
After the Fed injected money and Democrats kept spending money, inflation surged. Inflation (CPI-U) rose at a 1.4 percent rate in January 2021, President Trump’s last month in his first term. Even throughout 2020, the pandemic’s first year, inflation exceeded 2 percent only twice (2.5 percent in January and 2.3 percent in February); otherwise, inflation was quiescent: not rising over 1.5 percent in any of 2020’s remaining ten months.
Then came President Biden. Biden’s administration triggered an inflation explosion. In March 2021, inflation hit 2.6 percent, higher than any month in 2020. In April 2021, it reached 4.2 percent; it hit 5 percent in May 2021 and 6.2 percent in October 2021. By December 2021, inflation was 7 percent. Biden’s inflation rise continued into 2022: It reached 8.5 percent in March 2021 and 9.1 percent in June 2022—a 40-year high. Even after falling from this 40-year peak, it remained high: In December 2022, it was still 6.5 percent. A year later, in December 2023, inflation was still running at 3.4 percent.
By the time Biden left office in January 2025, inflation was still climbing at 3 percent. That 3 percent level—among the lowest of Biden’s four years—is still the highest (reached this September) of Trump’s first year in office.
The inflation contrast couldn’t be starker; its timing couldn’t be clearer.
The Left is forever accusing others of the sins they commit. The Left does so in the hope of hiding their guilt in the claim “everyone does it.”
We see the Left try this ploy time and time again: weaponizing the power of the executive against their opponents (Operation Arctic Frost is but the latest example), claiming persecution when their crimes are prosecuted, using violent and histrionic rhetoric to demonize their opponents, perpetrating violence nationwide and on behalf of every conceivable reason (from antisemitism, to anti-free speech on college campuses, to attacks on ICE officers, who are merely enforcing the law).
Beyond hypocrisy, the Left’s actions are strategy: a calculated exercise in relativity. Their hope is that if they shout their charges long and loud enough, Americans will believe them—or at least be unable to hear the truth.
That the Left and Democrats would take their hackneyed strategy into the area of economics should come as no surprise: It is, after all, their go-to ploy. The only surprise should be that it took them so long to do so.
What they want to do with “affordability” is for America to focus on the effect (high prices) and forget the cause (Democrats’ four years of inflationary policies). It’s the same thing we see with their outrage over ICE enforcement that is the result of the Biden administration’s four years of open borders.
However, there are problems with their gambit on “affordability.” Democrats’ spending was so clearly and quantifiably exorbitant. Surging inflation’s coincidence with Biden’s time in office. The connection between Democrats’ and the Left’s uncontrolled spending and inflation is too patently clear.
Yet while the connection is obvious, digging out of the inflation hole Democrats dug is not easy. Or quickly. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett recently described the residual gap in Americans’ purchasing power as “a $3,000 hole because of Biden policies, and we’ve gained $1,200 on the way out already, which should give you a great deal of hope for the future that the wage increases that we’re seeing will continue.”
America cannot fill in overnight the fiscal and economic chasm that Democrats and the Left spent four years excavating.
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Townhall’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join Townhall VIP and use the promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member