By Stephen Moore
The new consumer prices report showing a 3.8% price rise in April confirms what Americans have been complaining about for months: Inflation is continuing to squeeze family budgets.
It’s indisputable that oil and fertilizer supply disruptions in the Middle East are driving up prices here at home.
But that’s only part of the inflation story. Consumer prices overall are up nearly 30% since COVID-19 derailed the U.S. economy six years ago. That’s the worst stretch of inflation since the bad old 1970s under Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, when inflation hit double-digit levels.
It’s important to remember why this spurt of rising prices has hit consumers right in the nose — er, wallet — if we are going to solve the affordability crisis.
If we look at the year-by-year bump up in prices, we see that inflation was tame in Donald Trump’s first term (2017-21), with an annualized rate of 2.5%. It would have been closer to 2% had it not been for COVID-19 and the lockdowns. Inflation was running below 2% in the months before Joe Biden took over the White House.
Then inflation rocketed to 9% in 2022.
The average annual inflation rate was 5% over the Biden presidency, with an overall 21% rise in prices. That was the worst inflation stretch since Carter.
Through the first 16 or so months of Trump 2.0, the inflation rate is running at just above 3%.
About 80% of the rise in prices over the past six years has been under Biden’s presidency. So, if you’re angry about the high price of nearly everything, Bidenomics is the primary villain.
Why did prices rise so rapidly under Biden? The answer is so obvious that only a Ph.D. Ivy League economist couldn’t get the answer right. It was runaway government spending. During COVID-19 and its aftermath, Uncle Sam spent more than $4 trillion.
Remember the Build Back Better Act, CHIPS and Science Act, Inflation Reduction Act and other “stimulus” bills? Every penny of that spending blitz was borrowed and essentially printed. Trump deserves some of the blame here for spending $1 trillion in his final months of his first term.
What’s worse is that none of that multitrillion-dollar emergency spending splurge has been drained out of the permanent budget.
What causes inflation? Too many dollars being spent on too few goods. Ironically, more than a dozen high-ranking economists, including three Nobel Prize winners, wrote in The New York Times that the Biden spending blitz “wouldn’t cause inflation.” Whoops!
What’s the point of this inflation/affordability history lesson? Private sector growth in output lowers inflation. More apples produced means apples are cheaper. Government growth usually accelerates inflation.
Here’s the impending political and economic danger for Republicans. The solution isn’t just to get the oil flowing through the Persian Gulf. We also have to reduce government spending right now. Republicans have a $200 billion supplemental spending bill for the military with not a penny of offsetting spending cuts.
If Republicans don’t start watching their Ps and Qs, as the old saying goes, we could see another Biden-type inflation surge with voters mad as hell. They can’t unilaterally get the oil flowing from the Middle East, but they can stop spending $2 trillion more than they take in. Trump recently announced a national initiative for physical fitness.
How about one for fiscal fitness?
Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.
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