A simple rule applies: the boss gets the credit, but the boss also gets the blame.
President Biden has been emphasizing that the rate of inflation has been dropping.If it’s fair for him to take credit for that, then it’s also fair to note that the inflation rate was 1.4% when he took office.Inflation has more than doubled under President Biden’s watch. But, at one point in his term, it had been more than six times higher.
Really, we shouldn’t be judging on the basis of inflation at all, which is the rate of change in prices, but on the actual level of prices. Here’s a simple illustration. If you got paid $25 an hour when President Biden took office, you’d have to be earning $29.25 now to be able to buy the exact same goods and services you did then. In other words, if your salary hasn’t gone up by 17.4% since Biden took office, your opinion of Bidenomics won’t be very positive.
This, I believe, accounts for President Biden’s 64% disapproval rating on his economic performance in last week’s ABC/Washington Post poll. Being told that prices are rising—but not as fast as they used to be rising—doesn’t mollify a voter who only knows prices are higher now, by a lot, than when Biden took office. We Californians experience this with great poignancy when we fill up our cars. Statewide, the average price was $3.33 when President Biden started his term; it’s now $5.81.
If President Biden didn’t claim so much credit for the lowered inflation rate, he might escape some blame for the fact that prices have risen so much since he began, either. However, where very few voters have a refined notion of what causes prices to increase, taking the credit entails taking the blame, too. President Reagan famously coined the “misery index” to criticize President Carter: it was the sum of inflation and unemployment . “Misery” is now at 8.1%; it was 6.1% for Trump.
Despite Reagan’s skilled phrasing, I believe that the inflation rate was really not what voters used to judge Carter; the level of prices was. Looking at that number, consumers paid 26.2% more for the same goods and services at this point in Carter’s administration than they did when he started. Reagan’s comparable number was 11.5% for his first term; 8.4% in his second.
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