Washington D.C., May 16, 2024 – Inflation cooled slightly in April, but even the slower price increases revealed this week still added to a tally that is perhaps the Biden campaign’s most intractable economic challenge in the 2024 campaign season.
Prices as measured by the seasonally-adjusted Consumer Price Index (CPI) are now up over 19.4% in the three-plus years since Biden took office.
Cumulative inflation has been a GOP focus for month and that continued Wednesday as new data showed the tally inching ever closer to a psychologically significant milestone of 20%.
The Trump campaign didn’t even wait for the threshold to be crossed Wednesday, with a statement from the campaign press secretary flatly stating “overall prices are up 20%.”
Trump himself, as he is tends to do, exaggerated the numbers further and largely beyond recognition. In a video response to the inflation report, he said without offering any evidence that inflation “takes away 30 to 50 percent of every dollar you have.”
President Biden himself reacted to the latest report with a statement calling costs his top economic priority while acknowledging that “even though we’ve made progress we have a lot more to do.”
For comparison’s sake, prices rose just under 7.8% during the 4 years of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Economists often note that the differences between inflation in the two eras are due to a range of factors far beyond the Oval Office occupant.
Under Trump, for example, COVID disruptions at the end of his presidency significantly drove down gas prices. Under Biden, supply chain issues drove prices up in other areas.
But either way, expect to hear a lot more around the cumulative inflation tallies from Trump and his allies over the next 6 months.
These higher prices and the accompanying “economic narrative here is pretty well baked in,” added Pangaea Policy founder Terry Haines.
“That hurts the president a lot in a lot of states that he needs to carry and it is a dynamic that shadows his campaign,” he added.
Many in Trump’s orbit measure the increase over Biden’s term even higher.
Make America Great Again Inc. is a super PAC that supports former President Trump, and it reacted to the news Wednesday by saying that overall prices were up 19.9% since Biden taking office.
The discrepancy between the 19.4% and 19.9% figures is based on how the Republican-aligned group uses data that isn’t seasonally adjusted, which shows a slightly higher gap. (Yahoo Finance)
