Donald Trump, during a heated US presidential election debate on Thursday, accused Joe Biden of doing a “poor job” on the US economy and presided over a dreadful rise in inflation, illustrating how rising prices and the cost of living have emerged as important themes ahead of the November presidential election.
“He has not done a good job. He’s done a poor job,” Trump said during CNN’s head-to-head debate with Biden in Atlanta, Georgia. “And inflation is killing our country. It is absolutely killing us.
“I gave him a country with essentially no inflation. It was perfect. It was so good; all he had to do was leave it alone,” he added. “He destroyed it.”
In reaction to Trump’s assaults on his record, Biden stated that Trump “absolutely decimated” the US economy when he was president.
“There was no inflation when I became president. You know why? The economy was flat on its back,” he said, adding that his administration had helped create “millions” of new jobs, including in minority communities.
Americans named inflation, or the cost of living, as “the most important financial problem facing their family” in each of the last three years, according to a recent poll from the Washington-based firm Gallup.
Perhaps more worryingly for the US president, 46 percent of adults in the United States said they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in Trump to do or recommend the right thing for the economy, while just 38 percent said the same thing about the current president, according to another Gallup poll.
While it is true that US consumer inflation rose substantially after Biden became president, reaching a multi-decade peak in 2022, the increase was primarily driven by a post-pandemic supply shortage and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In response, the US Federal Reserve raised its key lending rate from nearly zero to a two-decade high of between 5.25 and 5.50 percent, which it has maintained for the past year.
Higher interest rates cool the economy by increasing borrowing costs for households and businesses, which has an indirect impact on everything from mortgage rates to auto loans.
Inflation has fallen substantially since the Fed began raising rates, but it remains stubbornly above its long-term target of two percent, putting the US central bank on hold while it awaits more favourable data.
Because inflation has been high for several years, consumer prices have risen by almost 20% since January 2021, when Biden assumed office, according to the Labour Department’s consumer pricing index (CPI) inflation calculator.
Under Trump, consumer prices increased by less than 6% during the same time period.
