President Biden has done nothing to change the trajectory of inflation afflicting American families as a tax on just about everything. The damage of his actions that made the United States dependent on foreign oil, broke our supply chain, and made America less secure hit another record on Thursday when the Consumer Price Index recorded a 7.9 percent jump year-over-year (as Katie covered here).
Despite inflation hitting multiple four-decade highs and gas prices reaching their all-time highs in the weeks and months preceding Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the White House has decided to pin the blame for all the economic pain caused by Biden on Russia.
Earlier this week, President Biden called rising fuel costs "Putin's price hike," a cute but meaningless phrase that is just more of Biden trying to blame a scapegoat rather than keep his promise that the buck stops with him.
Again on Thursday, the White House's official statement on the latest record-breaking inflation number called the skyrocketing cost of living "a reminder that Americans' budgets are being stretched by price increases and families are starting to feel the impacts of Putin’s price hike."
The White House's statement dug itself a deeper hole by trying to write off Biden's long-running inflation as merely new "costs at home" as the Biden administration imposes "crippling sanctions in response to Putin’s unprovoked war." Obvious question: What does the White House think caused rising "costs at home" during Biden's first 13 months in office? Obvious answer: The Biden administration's policies.
Any claims that inflation and rising prices are a recent development ignore the fact that inflation has been a feature of Biden's tenure, long before Putin began amassing forces along Ukraine's border. Gas was already up more than $1 per gallon, and overall inflation had driven consumer prices to four-decade highs. What's more, the data released on Thursday doesn't even take Putin's invasion into account.
That inconvenient truth was highlighted on Thursday morning during a segment responding to the latest inflation data on CNN of all places where Biden and the White House's attempts to blame Putin were smacked down by facts.
This week, the White House blamed Vladimir Putin for inflation.
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) March 10, 2022
This morning, new inflation numbers revealed the highest consumer prices since 1982, and even CNN admitted that these record numbers don't take Putin's invasion into account. pic.twitter.com/GM85vfYdGR
"Inflation is accelerating, these are pre-war numbers as well," CNN's Chief Business Correspondent Christine Romans noted. "Many people had thought we'd see a peak in inflation in March maybe, well now we have a war in Russia, not captured — war in Ukraine — not captured here."
CNN's Romans also emphasized that the month-over-month increase of inflation of 0.8 percent shows "inflation is accelerating," as opposed to just hitting now due to Putin's actions. "All these things you basically can't live without are rising here," Romans added of the data. "You can see just why so many Americans are so sour on the economy...because they're paying more for just about everything."
"And again," Romans said at the end of her report, "these numbers don't capture the big disruption in the economy from Putin's war in Ukraine."
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