Even though she’s supposed be an “expert” on economics and finance, Fox host Maria Bartiromo got caught blatantly lying about the cause of inflation Sunday morning and called out by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).
Khanna was a guest on “Sunday Morning Futures,” and Bartiromo claimed that President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 relief package “was the beginning of inflation getting stoked.”
The congressman told Bartiromo:
“Maria, just to be factual on inflation, there was $3 trillion of spending under President Trump. And yes, there was spending under Joe Biden. But it is unfair to say that it’s just the spending under Biden that somehow caused the inflation and not under Trump.”
Bartiromo interrupted to interject:
“Just to be clear, I’m looking specifically at the numbers and when we look at the inflation timeline, which was the handover from President Trump to President Biden. … By the time that we got to July of 2021, inflation was at 5.5%. Then the Democrats led the infrastructure package. That was signed into law November 21 and inflation was up to 6.8%. By March of 2022, right after the invasion by Russia, inflation was at 7.9% and today we are 8.6%
“So we’re up to 9.1%, Congressman, with all of this spending.”
Once more, Khanna countered expertly:
“But, Maria, you know correlation and causation are different. You can’t say that Trump sending stimulus checks in December of 2020 was not inflationary and somehow Biden doing in March was inflationary.
“What happened is we got out of Covid. And that increased demand and the supply was constrained and the Fed policy was wrong.”
Bartiromo also neglected to mention that the U.S. economy was in a jobless recession when Trump left office, as Fortune reported in January of 2021:
In a two-month period, February to April 2020, the unemployment rate soared to an 80-year high and the number of employed Americans fell from 152.5 million to 130.3 million. Those 22.2 million job losses set U.S. employment back to 1999 levels.
Since, the economy has moved from contraction to expansion and seen 12.3 million jobs return. However, it hasn’t been enough to offset the job losses that occurred during the pandemic.
That means that Trump will become the first post–World War II president to see employment fall during his presidency. It last occurred when Herbert Hoover left office in 1933 amid the early years of the Great Depression.
Trump bungled the U.S. response to COVID-19, and that caused massive economic disruption, part of which we are experiencing even now.
Nice try, Maria, but you’re just as full of crap as Trump himself, who continues to lie about the economy doing better with him as president than ever in U.S. history. It didn’t, and he will always be a one-term, twice-impeached loser.
