President Joe Biden‘s inability to stop lying about his record may be compulsive, but the lies spun by his hagiographers in the media are a calculated defense for the president’s flailing reelection bid. With no topic is this folie a deux more pervasive than regarding the worst inflationary crisis, and no example of this pathological dishonesty more archetypal than Biden’s interview with Time magazine.
To the credit of the magazine’s interviewers, Time staff correctly called Biden out on the reality that inflation, which compounds over time, means that “prices are up nearly 20% since [Biden] took office and that wage increases have not kept pace.” Naturally, Biden deflects with a lie.
“Wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation, which you’re talking about as the prices that were pre-COVID prices,” the Democrat said in response. “Pre-COVID prices are not the same as whether or not they — you have American, corporate America ripping off the public now. You have everything from shrinkflation to what’s going on in terms of the way in which they’re artificially moving significantly to increase their, their, their, their, their profits. That’s not the same as inflation. That’s price gouging.”
Predictably, not one assertion made by Biden here is actually true.
From February 2020 to January 2021, or from before COVID-19 brought the country to a government-imposed standstill until vaccines began to be distributed to the masses, prices only rose 1.3%, below the Federal Reserve’s maximum inflation target of 2%. As Time correctly noted, prices have risen nearly 20% from the start of Biden’s presidency until now.
Over the past three years, inflation has averaged nearly 6% per year, or close to three times the Fed’s maximum acceptable target. And while Biden has repeated his “blame corporate greed” canard, corporate profit margins have only fallen throughout his presidency, with economists at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank determining that corporate profits only exerted significant inflationary pressure in 2021, when inflation remained lower, and not nearly at all in 2022, when inflation skyrocketed to near-double digits.
But the biggest and boldest lie told by Biden is that wage increases have outpaced inflation when they demonstrably have not. Since the start of his presidency, real average weekly earnings have fallen by 4.7%. By contrast, real average weekly earnings increased by 8.9% under four years of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Equally pernicious is the way the execrable “fact-checkers” at Time undermine the magazine’s own journalists. Even though the reporters questioning Biden correctly say that “wage increases have not kept pace” throughout this administration, the fact-checkers quietly shift the goalposts to cover for the president.
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“New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows hourly wage growth topping inflation for the past 12 months,” the magazine’s fact check of the interview reads. “In April, nominal hourly earnings were up 3.9% from a year ago; inflation held at 3.4%. But cumulative inflation has outpaced wage growth for most of the Biden presidency.”
As we’ve already illustrated, inflation hasn’t outpaced wage growth for “most” of Biden’s presidency. It has done so throughout his presidency, both on a cumulative level and a 0.4% loss in April alone. Biden is lying to cover for his own disastrous record, and “fact-checkers” are undermining their own colleagues to assist him.