Trump is the biggest job-losing president in history, you know.
The U.S. economy is showing signs of stagflation as growth slumps down and prices continue to surge for average Americans, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
U.S. annual economic growth measured just 1.6% in the first quarter of 2024, following a report of persistently high inflation in March of 3.5% year-over-year. The combination of both low growth and high inflation, in conjunction with continuously high amounts of government spending and debt, has led to signs of stagflation in the U.S. economy, which wreaked havoc on U.S. consumers throughout the 1970's, according to experts who spoke to the DCNF.
"It's not so much that we risk stagflation as we're already there," E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation's Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the DCNF. "We have basically pulled forward trillions of dollars of economic growth by borrowing from the future, but that must be repaid at some point. And it is highly inefficient as well."
Stagflation is a unique economic phenomenon that involves slow growth, high unemployment, and elevated inflation and is particularly difficult to address as solutions for one issue can exacerbate the others, according to Investopedia. The most notable example of stagflation occurred in the 1970's, after an oil crisis.
Welcome Back Carter.
The U.S. national debt climbed above $34 trillion for the first time at the start of 2024 and currently sits at nearly $34.6 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. The national debt has increased by around $6.8 trillion since President Joe Biden first took office in January 2021.
"Stagflation is the inevitable result of Bidenomics," Michael Faulkender, chief economist at the America First Policy Institute, told the DCNF. "When you massively increase spending, whether green subsidies or student loan forgiveness, while simultaneously reducing the ability of the economy to produce because of all the regulatory restrictions being imposed, you get reductions in growth with higher prices. If Bidenomics continues, then we should expect stagflation to continue."
Biden has made high-spending policies part of his broader agenda, signing the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021 and the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in November 2021. The president also signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, which authorized $750 billion in new spending, with $370 billion of that dedicated to green initiatives to combat climate change.
The Biden administration's latest plan to forgive student loans would cost an estimated $559 billion over the next ten years through various loan cancellations and interest suspensions. The president had one of his previous, more costly plans to forgive student loans struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2023.
No problem for Biden! He'll just pivot to immigration.
A clear majority of US voters say that border security is the most important thing for Congress to work on with a little more than six months to go before next year's election.
Nearly six in 10 voters (57%) say that "border reform legislation" is "more important" than "all other things Congress could be working on," according to a poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Americans for Prosperity released Monday.
A plurality of voters (42%) said they were most in favor of a hypothetical policy to "secure our border and ports," while another 36% said they most wanted to establish "clear and predictable rules and laws for our immigration system.