Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell set a reporter from Fox Business straight on the basics of the U.S. economy and inflation Wednesday during a press conference.
During the press conference, reporter Edward Lawrence suggested that government spending was partially responsible for inflation, remarking:
“Inflation has been rather sticky, so do you need help from the fiscal side to get inflation down faster?”
Powell replied:
“We don’t give advice to the fiscal authorities, and we assume that we take fiscal policy as it comes to our front door, stick it in our model along with a million other things, and we have responsibility for price stability. And we will get inflation down to 2% in time.”
Lawrence tried again to link spending to inflation:
“But the spending that’s happened is working against what you are doing, right? So it’s prolonging inflation?”
On Monday, the House Rules Committee began hearings on the long-awaited Republican plan for controlling inflation, and it didn’t take long before it became clear that their bill — HR 347 a.k.a. the “Rein In Act” — is nothing but a publicity stunt that won’t do a damn thing to help reduce prices or inflation.
One of the committee members, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), began his comments on the legislation by noting, “The world has been waiting with bated breath for their answer to it. The long wait is over.”
“You heard that right: A reporting requirement related to executive orders.”
Specifically, the bill would require would require the Biden administration to “provide an inflation estimate” of every executive order “with a significant effect on the gross budget.” Why? According to committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY), so that the president will “think twice” before he issues any future orders.
This led Raskin to dryly comment:
“Whether you think this is the most brilliant legislation since Social Security, or the dumbest idea since the last trillion-dollar giveaway in taxes, you must concede that it will have little or zero effect on the global inflation rate or the domestic inflation rate.
“We know executive orders have nothing to do with inflation” and the Reins Act is “devoid of any serious legislative meaning where potential economic consequence … it’s pathetically weak.”
The Maryland Democrat suggested a more accurate name for the legislation would be the “Running on Empty Initiative based on no ideas — None — Act.”
You can watch the video of Raskin’s remarks at this link
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:
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.
Last time you went to the grocery store, how much did you pay for a gallon of milk?
I was in the grocery store on Wednesday and one of my purchases was a gallon of 2% milk, for which I paid $4.06.
But according to Fox News host Sandra Smith, she had to pay $11 for a gallon of milk in New York, Mediaite reports:
“You have the egg-o-meter, I have the milk-o-meter. I bought a gallon of milk last night. Granted we live in New York, things are higher priced than in a lot of other areas in the country. It is nearly $11 for a gallon of milk at a New York grocery store.”
Complaining about inflation, Fox anchor Sandra Smith says it's nearly $11 for a gallon of milk in New York — there's no way this is true, right?
Even in New York, the only thing you would pay $11 a gallon for is certain select organic brands of milk. But the average gallon costs nowhere near that, no matter were in the U.S. you happen to be.
According to the USDA’s ’s Agricultural Marketing Service, “the average price for a gallon of milk in NYC rose from $4.60 at the beginning of the year to $4.69 in March.”
Twitter users were only too happy to declare Smith’s statement to be complete bullshit, because it most certainly is.
