From WWW.THEEPOCHTIMES.COM
President Joe Biden downplayed the cost-of-living crisis that’s squeezing American households, arguing in a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that inflation over the past several months “hasn’t spiked” and that the monthly rate of inflation was negligible.
Biden made the remarks in response to a question about soaring inflation posed by CBS’s Scott Pelley, who noted that the most recent Consumer Price Index (CPI) came in at an annual 8.3 percent and that Americans are “shocked by their grocery bills.”
Grocery store inflation—based on the so-called “food away from home” expenditure category in the CPI—shot up by an annual 13.5 percent in August, the fastest in 43 years.
Pelley then asked the president what he can do “better and faster” to bring down prices. Biden replied by calling for “perspective” and pointing out that the month-over-month rate of change of inflation was relatively small.
“The infl ation rate month to month was just … an inch, hardly at all,” Biden said.
Overall, prices rose at a pace of 0.1 percent between July and August, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The monthly pace of inflation was 1.0 percent in May, 1.3 percent in June, and 0.0 percent in July, BLS data show.
Biden bristled when pressed about the fact that the annual pace of inflation of 8.3 percent is running close to a multi-decade high.
“I got that,” Biden replied. “But guess what we are. We’re in a position where, for the last several months, it hasn’t spiked. It has just barely … it’s been basically even.”
The president added that bringing down inflation was going to be a “process” and vowed to “get control of inflation” eventually, including by adopting what he described as pro-growth economic policies like “growing entire new industries,” presumably in the clean-energy domain…. (Read more)
