After being widely excoriated for making the false claim last week that inflation was nine percent when he took office, 81 year-old Pres. Joe Biden said it again - either lying or forgetting that he’d already made the false claim and been corrected.
“I think inflation has gone slightly up. It was at 9% when I came in and it’s now down to about 3%,” Biden said Tuesday in an interview with Yahoo Finance:
“I think inflation has gone slightly up. It was at 9% when I came in and it’s now down to about 3%.”
Biden made the same far-off claim last Wednesday in an interview with CNN:
“No president has had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office — 9%.”
Biden made the false claim a third time in recent weeks, on April 10, fact-checkers at The Washington Post reported Wednesday, quoting Biden remarks at a press conference with the prime minister of Japan:
“We have dramatically reduced inflation from 9 percent down to close to 3 percent. We’re in a situation where we’re better situated than we were when we took office where inflation was skyrocketing.”
For repeating the false claim three times, The Post gives Biden a rating of ”Four Pinocchios” (on a scale of one to four), which it reserves for "Whoppers."
In fact, 12-month inflation was a mere 1.4% in January of 2021 when Biden entered - and Donald Trump left - the Oval Office.
Inflation didn’t reach nine percent until about a year and a half into Biden’s presidency, The New York Post notes:
“Inflation crept up shortly after Biden took office before surging to rates unseen since the early 1980s, peaking at an annual rate of 9.1% in June 2022 — 17 months after he took office.”
As CNSNews reported on Wednesday, 12-month inflation topped three percent for the 37th straight month in April, logging in at 3.4%. The last time it was under three percent was in March of 2001 (2.6%), before jumping to 4.2% the next month and beginning its current 37-month run.
The business and economic reporting of CNSNews is funded in part with a gift made in memory of Dr. Keith C. Wold.