March 4, 2021.
That was the day that Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate to advance the behemoth $1.9 trillion spending package known as the American Rescue Plan. The bill — which not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for — was signed into law a week later.
The American Rescue Plan was the catalyst that sparked the country’s highest inflation rates in over 40 years, with The Washington Post noting that prices on a wide-range of items began to rise “within days” of the bill being signed into law. The following month, inflation jumped from 2.6% to 4.2%, the highest number in well over a decade, and a year later, inflation rates were soaring over 8% on a monthly basis, going as high as 9.1% in June 2022.
According to the newest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices on nearly everything have skyrocketed during the three and a half years that the Biden-Harris administration has been in office, including:
Food for K-12, +65.5% Car Insurance, +54% Hotels, +51.2% Gasoline, +50.5% Fuel Oil, +49.1% Transportation, +32.9% Electricity, +31.7% Baby Food, +30.1% Restaurants, +23% Airfare, +22.6% Rent, +22% Groceries, +21.6%These categories also do not take into account the loss in average weekly earnings that Americans take home, which is down -3.9% under the Biden-Harris administration.
Soaring inflation rates also triggered the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates, which in turn made it significantly more expensive for Americans to take out loans to buy homes and cars.
Housing has become so unaffordable under the Biden-Harris administration that 77% of Americans cannot afford a median-priced new home, and homes are unaffordable in 99% of the country for the average American.
Numerous economic experts, including many on the political Left, warned before the American Rescue Plan was passed that it would likely cause severe damage to the economy because the economy was already well on its way to recovering from the economic damage that occurred following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
Former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard warned on February 5, 2021 — the same day that Harris cast her first tie-breaking vote, which paved the way for the American Rescue Plan — that the $1.9 trillion bill was likely to “overheat the economy so badly as to be counterproductive.”
Blanchard said that he agreed with an assessment from economist Larry Summers, who served as Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama. Summers had warned in a Washington Post op-ed that the American Rescue Plan was a macroeconomic stimulus “on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels” that would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.”
Former Obama economic adviser Steven Rattner wrote in The New York Times in November 2021 that he and other top economists warned the administration that “shoveling an unprecedented amount of spending into an economy already on the road to recovery would mean too much money chasing too few goods.”
“The original sin was the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March,” Rattner added. “The bill — almost completely unfunded — sought to counter the effects of the Covid pandemic by focusing on demand-side stimulus rather than on investment. That has contributed materially to today’s inflation levels.”
Another top economist in the Obama administration, Jason Furman, said that the bill was far “too big” and that he did not know “any economist” who supported the $1.9 trillion bill.
Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said: “We put gasoline on the fire. That’s basically what the ARP did. It was almost written as if we didn’t just pass a trillion-dollar stimulus in December.”
But it’s not just the Biden-Harris administration’s American Rescue Plan that sent inflation rates skyrocketing over the last three and half years; the administration’s war on the oil and gas industry and its weakness on foreign policy also played key roles.
The administration hit the oil and gas industry with new regulations that imposed significant costs on the industry which get passed on to consumers. The administration also halted new oil and gas drilling leases on federal land, which increased costs for consumers. The administration’s war on energy not only directly harmed consumers, it also cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars in lost GDP.
Increased fuel costs directly increase the costs of nearly all goods and services for consumers as it becomes more expensive to gather resources needed to manufacture products and to distribute the products to stores or directly to consumers.
“Everything we purchase is either grown with or manufactured with or transported by energy, and making energy expensive, as Biden-Harris has done, has made life expensive,” Daniel Turner, Founder and Executive Director of Power The Future, said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “The only way to reduce costs for American families is to unleash American energy and end the ideological war on American fossil fuels, but Kamala is too beholden to the radical green movement which puts climate hysteria ahead of the need for affordable food.”
On the foreign policy front, critics have said that the administration’s weakness on the global stage made Russia feel emboldened enough to invade Ukraine and face few consequences. Biden refused to take preemptive measures that could have prevented the war, including sending Ukraine weapons that they were begging for, enacting sanctions against Russia as it amassed troops along the Ukrainian border, and more.
Russia’s war in Ukraine caused chaos in supply chains — just as they were starting to get sorted out from the pandemic — that resulted in increased inflation, according to an economic analysis from KPMG.
Democrats passed another massive spending bill in 2022 — the Inflation Reduction Act — which was not actually focused on inflation, but rather on green-energy spending.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model found that the Inflation Reduction Act’s impact on inflation was “statistically indistinguishable from zero,” while the Tax Foundation said that the bill “worsens inflation” by constricting the economy’s ability to grow and by increasing government spending.
Inflation could explode if Harris is elected to be president because of some of the extreme policy proposals that she has embraced, including the Green New Deal, which she co-sponsored with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in 2020.
Experts have said that the Green New Deal could cost up to $93 trillion, a number that was calculated in 2019, before the high inflation rates of the Biden-Harris administration.
Harris said that she would support ending the Senate filibuster to ram through her Green New Deal, which she described as the “most aggressive and progressive” piece of legislation, through Congress.
Another policy that Harris has adopted is introducing price controls to combat the inflation that the Biden-Harris administration caused. Price controls lead to shortages, black markets, a reduction in product quality, a reduction in industry investment and, when the price controls are removed, an explosion in inflation.
Harris’ price control proposal was so bad that even CNN, economic columnists, and The Washington Post Editorial Board warned about the dangers of implementing such a policy.
Harris’ housing proposal would give first time homeowners $25,000 in down payment, thus increasing the prices of homes by $25,000 and increasing demand pressures which would also increase housing costs.
Harris’ campaign unveiled her plan on Monday to increase the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, which will lead to more inflation as businesses will have to charge more for goods and services. Increasing the corporate tax rate will also reduce wages for workers and damage economic growth.
The economy and inflation is by far the top issue for voters this year, with 73% of the country saying that “strengthening the economy” needs to be a top priority for the next administration and 62% of Americans saying that inflation represents “a very big problem” in the country today.
The Trump campaign is running ads in markets across America in both English and Spanish reminding voters that the Biden-Harris administration’s policies caused the inflation crisis that is hurting families.
The Donald Trump campaign is up on TV in battleground states with this spot which hits Kamala Harris on the economy — pic.twitter.com/UeF2cRBC52
— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) August 17, 2024
