Not in isolation from each other, but more importantly, not in isolation from other factors that also impact our economy.
The Biden-Harris administration and the associated “advisors” on staff focused on inflation during the just concluded campaign season (the article at the link mentions spending packages during the first Trump administration along with spending packages at the onset of the Biden-Harris administration as causes of that inflation), but they missed other key factors.
…roughly 40% of voters said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other. Those voters backed Trump by a 22-percentage-point margin. Inflation has declined without a recession, but many were thinking instead about how prices are still high.
This was while the Progressive-Democrats and the Left kept on about how inflation was abating (that the Biden-Harris administration’s spending had caused the sharply higher inflation is beside the point of this post), while us average Americans were concerned about prices. After all, we pay our bills based on actual, extant prices, not based on how prices change from time to time.
That’s not all, though:
White House officials interviewed for this story defended their record by pointing to how the ARP was designed at a time when it wasn’t at all clear the country was about to escape the pandemic. Virus counts and deaths were rising as Biden took office.
The data, collected in real time, made clear that while the Wuhan Virus was enormously contagious, it wasn’t very dangerous except to one relatively small slice of our (and the world’s) population: the very old and especially those with severe comorbidities. Outside of that, the mortality rate from the virus was a very small fraction of one percent; even the risk of hospitalization was not much larger than that tiny rate. The rising virus counts and deaths were solely the result of the virus’ enormous infection rate.
And yet, the Biden-Harris administration extended the virus-related declared national emergency for another two years, which facilitated the administration’s ability to control our economy wholly independently of actual economic factors.
Then,
Strong demand from Biden’s additional fiscal stimulus…ran headlong into crippled supply chains and discombobulated labor markets.
This would have been known, and was at the time, to any high school economics student. The hard drop in labor had already occurred—those shutdowns—and was already in rapid recovery at the end of the Trump administration, for all that employment still had a considerable ways to go, and the disruption to the supply chains—from the various nations’ shutdown of their borders—had already occurred and was in full disruption. It’s a basic tenet of economics, too, that when demand outstrips production supply, prices have nowhere to go but up. It was clear at the time, too, that production supply was going to be disrupted for some time as producers were not going to be able to expand production (they couldn’t even maintain their original production rates) from those labor and input supply chain dislocations.
The administration worthies and the press ignored all of this in their determination to panic-monger and deprecate everything Trumpian in that preceding administration.
There’s this laugher (otherwise it’s simply insulting to our intelligence), too:
White House and Democratic officials have argued that overall US economic outcomes were better than those achieved in nearly every other advanced economy.
Whoopty-do. None of us, average Americans and elitists alike, live in any of those “other advanced economies.” We live here, in our US economy, confronted with our US economic outcomes, and those outcomes were highly disruptive to our lives when they weren’t being outright destructive of our livelihoods.
That these folks still are making excuses rather than learning from those mistakes makes it unlikely that Party can be trusted with our economy any time soon.
