Sixteen Nobel prize-winning economists issued a letter attacking former President Donald Trump just hours ahead of the first 2024 presidential debate.
In the letter, the authors warned that Trump, if re-elected, would destroy the U.S. economy and cause consumers to pay higher prices at the store.
The economists claimed that Trump’s economic policies would drive inflation to unprecedented levels with his “fiscally irresponsible budgets.” However, under President Joe Biden’s term, inflation has risen to about 5.6 percent. In comparison, inflation averaged 1.9 percent under the Trump Administration— typically below the Federal Reserve’s two percent target.
In 2021, the inflation rate was at 1.4 percent. By June 2022, as Biden settled into his term, the inflation rate spiked to nine percent.
The real average weekly earnings rose to 8.2 percent, while it was down 3.9 percent under Biden.
In addition, there have been 36 months with year-over-year inflation at or above three percent. On the contrary, with Trump in office, there were zero months.
Meanwhile, last year, the average Thanksgiving dinner was 14.7 percent higher than when Trump was in office. In 2021, the holiday meal only cost Americans $53.31. Families shelled out a whopping 25 percent more than the $48.91 they did in 2019.
The letter reads:
Among the most important determinants of economic success are the rule of law and economic and political certainty. For a country like the US, which is embedded in deep relationships with other countries, conforming to international norms and having normal and stable relationships with other countries is also an imperative. Donald Trump and the vagaries of his actions and policies threaten this stability and the US’s standing in the world. While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s. In his first four years as President, Joe Biden signed into law major investments in the U.S. economy, including in infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and climate. Together, these investments are likely to increase productivity and economic growth while lowering long-term inflationary pressures and facilitating the clean energy transition.
The letter also touted Biden’s “remarkably strong and equitable” economic recovery since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump campaign’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt hit back against the letter, praising the former president for building one of the strongest economies in U.S. history.
"The American people don’t need worthless out-of-touch Nobel Prize winners to tell them which president put more money in their pockets... Joe Biden’s out-of-control spending created the worst inflation crisis in generations,” Leavitt said.
According to polls, the economy and inflation are the Americans’ top concerns, repeatedly indicating that they trust Trump more with the economy than Biden.
A June YouGov for the Economist survey found that 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Biden’s economic policies, with just 31 percent approving.
A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll also found that respondents trust Trump to do a better job on the economy and inflation than the 81-year-old president by a margin of 14 percentage points.