When President Joe Biden was running for office in 2020, he explicitly promised that putting him in the White House would mean that “you’ll actually see your standard of living go up and your costs go down.”
That, uh, hasn’t happened.
We don’t need to relitigate the entire economic history of the Biden administration in this space, but here’s a quick recap: Inflation surged to a 40-year high, peaking above 9 percent in June 2022. Prices are now rising less quickly, but inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2 percent. (It was 3.4 percent for the 12 months ending in December. We’ll get January’s numbers on Tuesday morning.) Biden’s policies—specifically, the $2 trillion spending package he signed in March 2021—certainly contributed to that inflationary spiral. Economists will continue to debate how much of a factor it was, but voters tend to operate on a more facile level of rewarding presidents for good economic times and punishing them for bad economic times. And rightly or only semi-rightly, Biden’s name is attached to this bout with inflation.
You might expect the president, now that he’s in the middle of a re-election campaign, to try to avoid anything to do with that topic. Don’t remind voters of how rough the past few years have been, focus on the future, talk about the positive signals coming from the economy, and above all else don’t make yourself look like an old man yelling at a cloud.
Hellbound and Down 