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Community Notes Comes for Joe Biden on Inflation

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  December 01, 2023 10:30 AM

On Thursday, President Joe Biden's political X account posted quite the whopper about inflation. In his brief post, which began by offering "Let me be clear," he calls out corporations. "Let me be clear to any corporation that hasn’t brought their prices back down even as inflation has come down: It’s time to stop the price gouging." His post calls on these corporations to "Give American consumers a break."

There's been over 17,000 replies to the post, and, as of Friday morning, more quote reposts than reposts, with many taking issue with the president's claim.

The quoted reposts came from former and current members of Congress, and with some particularly candid comments from Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-TX) case. As they pointed out, it's concerning that the person writing this post--we know Biden isn't always the one doing so--would share it despite not knowing as much about economics as he or she should.

And now, there's a Community Notes reference as well, which brought even more quoted reposts.

"As long as the inflation rate is positive, prices are increasing. The fact that inflation has come down to 3.2% in October means that prices are still going up, albeit at a slower rate than before," the note reads. 

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This particular note contains multiple references, including the International Monetary Fund, an article from USA Today's Money section titled "Prices don't drop when inflation eases. Why your wallet will be hurting for a while" directly addressing the president's claim, and a Statista graph showing inflation rates from October 2020 to October 2023. The Community Note also mentions that the Federal Reserve aims for a 2 percent inflation rate.

Among the last 11 presidents, Biden has the third highest inflation rate, at 5 percent, according to a recent GoBankingRates piece. His predecessor, Donald Trump, had the second lowest, at 1.4 percent. Only President George W. Bush fared better, being the only president on the list to have a 0.0 percent rate. By the Fed's standards, Trump met the goal. 

Then again, failure to take responsibility has long been an issue for the Biden administration, including and especially on the issue of inflation. 

Earlier this month, the Washington Examiner's Byron York put out a column, "Bidenomics 2023: Inflation Down, Prices Up." Spencer also put out an analysis on "Why October's Inflation Report Is Anything But Good News."

Just earlier this week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre went with a problematic narrative on the economy.

When a reporter aptly asked "why do you think it is that when you say the economy is improving and President Biden says the economy is improving that a majority of Americans outside of this building are not buying it," Jean-Pierre's response was to blame the Trump administration. She's gone with such a tactic in the past.

"When we walked into this administration, the economy was on a tailspin--that is the fact--because of the last administration, because of the Trump administration, because of how they dealt with--dealt with COVID and the pandemic, because they didn’t have a comprehensive plan," she claimed. She later went on to claim "we understand what Americans have been feeling over the last two, three years. It’s going to take some time. We get that. It’s going to take some time.  But it does not take away how we have seen the economy getting back on its feet. We actually had to fix the problem that we saw that the last administration left us."

Jean-Pierre even gave Biden credit for the American Rescue Plan, which led to massive inflation, as even Democratic economists like Larry Summers had warned about.

According to RealClearPolitics (RCP), Biden has an overall 35 percent approval rating on inflation, while 61.8 percent disapprove. On the handful of issues listed by RCP, he only has an overall slightly worse approval rating on immigration, where just 34.5 percent approve and 62.5 percent disapprove. Biden has a 38.4 percent approval rating on the economy, while 59 percent disapprove. 

Polls consisently show that respondents favor Trump over Biden on the economy. During his time in office, he had a 52.2 percent approval rating on he economy according to RCP.