On March 11, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest Consumer Price Index report, which showed inflation rose 0.8 percent in February, hitting a 40-year high of 7.9 percent.
A few days later, President Biden took an unearned victory lap on Twitter, saying, “Before I took office, people were hurting and we had to act. We passed the American Rescue Plan without a single, solitary Republican vote. Few pieces of legislation in our history have done more to lift the country out of crisis.”
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, ironically, was passed and signed into law by Biden on March 11, 2021, one year to the day of the worst inflation report the country has seen in four decades.
So, based on fundamental economic benchmarks, has Biden’s American Rescue Plan actually lifted the country out of crisis? Or, could a compelling case be made that Biden’s American Rescue Plan made matters worse?
Let’s begin with the rate of inflation before the $1.9 trillion bill became law. In February 2021, just two months into his administration, the rate of inflation was 1.7 percent. Since Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, the rate of inflation has steadily increased. What’s more, the rate of inflation more than doubled from February to April 2021, proving that shoveling $1.9 trillion into the economy was perhaps not the wisest decision.
Before Biden took office and embarked on his unprecedented spending spree that also included the $1.1 trillion “infrastructure” law, the rate of inflation was tame. Throughout 2020, the rate of inflation hovered near 1 percent.
Nowadays, as trillions of dollars are sloshing throughout the economy, inflation continues to climb higher every month that passes.
Coincidentally, the price of a gallon of gas has also increased rapidly in the year or so Biden has been in office. In December 2020, the average price for a gallon of gas was $2.24. Today, the average price of a gallon of gas has skyrocketed to $4.33.
Similar trends apply to oil, which was trading at $59 per barrel in December 2020. Today, it has almost doubled to $110 per barrel.
Of course, not all of this bad news can or should be blamed exclusively on Biden’s American Rescue Plan. One should also bear in mind that Biden’s war on domestic energy production is also playing a leading role in skyrocketing prices.
Lest we forget, on day one of his presidency, Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported approximately 900,000 barrels of oil from Canada to refineries in Texas every day.
Adding insult to injury, Biden also banned oil and natural gas companies from seeking new leases on federal lands. And the canard that oil and gas companies are sitting on 9,000 unused leases is pure propaganda from the White House. Anyone with a modicum of commonsense knows full well that if energy companies could drill on federal lands, they would do so at the drop of a hat.
Without a doubt, Americans are feeling the pain of Biden’s inflationary policies. According to a new report by Moody’s Analytics, the average American family is paying $300 more per month due to inflation.
Moreover, most Americans do not see inflation declining anytime in the near future. Per a recent Gallup poll, 79 percent of Americans expect inflation to persist over the next six months, with more than 50 percent expecting it to increase “a lot” over that period.
In yet another very telling statistic demonstrating that Biden’s American Rescue Plan did not actually lift the country out of crisis, the number of unfilled jobs in the United States has increased substantially since the law was signed.
In February 2021, the month before the bill became law, there were 7.8 million unfilled jobs. In the months since Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, that number has steadily increased. It now stands at a whopping 11.3 million. Perhaps expanding welfare payments, food stamp benefits, and all the other social welfare programs buried in the American Rescue Plan incentivized Americans to stay home and collect checks from Uncle Sam rather than return to the workforce.
Suffice to say, despite Biden’s cringe-worthy tweet that the American Rescue Plan belongs in the legislative pantheon, it has failed to live up to its grand expectations. And, notwithstanding Biden’s grandstanding and gaslighting, Americans are well are aware of this.