(The Center Square) – President Joe Biden is only a few weeks away from the end of his time in office, and one key part of his legacy is undeniable: inflation.
Biden has battled inflation from the start, but critics say he helped fuel it with trillions of dollars in deficit spending during his four years in office. Federal debt spending is offset in part by printing money, which increases inflation.
Biden has boasted bringing inflation rates down from about 9% earlier in his term to roughly 2.5% currently.
While the rate of inflation has slowed, that doesn’t mean prices have decreased. In fact, they continue rising, albeit slower than earlier in his term.
The federal government released a a key inflation marker Friday, its Personal Consumption Expenditure index, which rose 2.4% last month, a bit less than expected.
Overall, though, prices have risen more than 20% since Biden took office.
According to the federal CPI inflation calculator, $100 in January 2021, when Biden took office, has the same buying power as $120 as of November of this year. That means $100 went much further in 2021 than it would today.
The price of groceries actually rose faster than overall inflation, increasing more than 22% since Biden took office.
Those higher prices have given Republicans plenty of fodder for their attacks on the incumbent president.
“The Biden-Harris Administration’s parting gift to the American people is as welcome as a lump of coal at Christmas: higher prices that keep rising,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., said in a statement Friday. “Families have been hammered by a 20 percent spike in prices under President Biden that has made the cost of living unaffordable. The American people are ready for the Trump presidency and a return to a strong, prosperous economy that created good-paying jobs.”
Polling data showed that despite some positive economic indicators this year — relatively low unemployment among them — Americans still had a poor view of the economy. At least one reason why was undeniably that costs, for groceries in particular, have soared since Biden took office.
Polling after the November election showed voters cited higher prices as a key consideration in their vote.
A poll from May of this year showed that Americans’ confidence in Biden’s handling of the economy hit a “historic low.”
From Gallup:
Obama’s confidence ratings were at least 50% each year except for one (42% in 2014). Biden has fared much worse as confidence in his economic management dropped precipitously in 2022 from 57% to 40% amid sharply higher inflation, and it has been below 40% since then. Only Bush earned lower confidence from Americans than Biden has since last year – by the end of his second term, amid the Great Recession, when just 34% of Americans expressed confidence in his economic abilities.
Gas prices spiked during Biden’s term as well, topping a historic national average of $5 per gallon before dropping, in part, because Biden emptied out much of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
When Biden took office, the national average price for a gallon of gas was about $2.39 per gallon.
Currently, the national average price for a gallon of unleaded gasoline is about $3.00 per gallon, according to AAA.
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