President Joe Biden claimed on Thursday that inflation would worsen if Republicans win in the midterms in November.
Speaking to Democrats and supporters in Los Angeles, Biden reacted to new data about the Consumer Price Index (CPI) from the Labor Department.
(2) DEM’s Inflation; blaming Republicans [who doesn’t run the White House or Congress] for Biden's inflation, is like blaming the cashier at a gas station or at a grocery store for soaring prices. pic.twitter.com/W2flr61PMh
— @KassMedefer (@KMedefer) October 14, 2022
“If Republicans win, inflation is going to get worse. It’s that simple,” he said.
The latest CPI report showed that prices increased 0.4 percent since the month of August. The real average hourly earnings also fell 2.8 percent in August compared to the previous year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Biden, however, tried to downplay the bad numbers and put a positive spin on the soaring inflation.
“Today’s inflation report shows some progress,” he boasted. “Overall, inflation was two percent over the last three months. That’s down from 11 percent over the prior three months.”
“That’s progress,” he continued. “But a lot of it is the result of getting the cost of living at the gas pump down, by more, now even in California now by more than a dollar nationally since we started this summer.”
The president also promised to keep working on lowering high gas prices, saying: “The price of gas is still too high and we need to keep working to bring it down.”
This comes after Biden admitted that the likelihood of an economic recession is possible during a rare televised interview on Tuesday.
“I don’t think there will be a recession. If it is, it’ll be a very slight recession. That is, we’ll move down slightly,” he said on CNN.
Americans have been suffering financial strain due to rising inflation and skyrocketing gas prices. A survey from Ramussen last week found that 57 percent of adults believe the U.S. will likely experience a “1930s-like Depression” over the next several years, including 27 percent who think it’s “very likely” the country will experience an economic depression.
The continued economic downturn has also doomed the Democrats ahead of the midterm elections next month, as a Times and Siena College survey found that 52 percent of voters said that they trust Republicans to manage the economy, while only 38 percent put their faith in the Dems.
