President Joe Biden and his people have spent the past year attempting to downplay and dismiss very real concerns about soaring consumer price inflation even though, for a substantial number of Americans, skyrocketing prices for virtually everything have reached a crisis level.
Now a Harvard economist has warned that inflation is not under control, excessive spending by Biden and Congress has made it worse, and the Federal Reserve may prove incapable of fixing the problem any time soon, Breitbart reported.
Biden “pouring buckets of fuel on the fire”
Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University, appeared on CNN International’s “First Move” on Thursday to discuss the issue of inflation and provide his rather grim outlook of an “epic recession” in the future.
“I think, in the end, they are going to pull up short. It’s true that if they wanted to really just wring inflation out of the system, and here we’re talking especially about the United States, where the — particularly, the last year, year-and-a-half has just had too much stimulus too late,” Rogoff said of the government’s efforts to handle rising prices.
“The inflation’s just way too high. It’s not getting under control,” he continued. “It would be nice to have it under control, but just how big a recession do you want to tolerate on top of so many other things? I suspect that they’ll end up, in two years, having raised interest rates to 3 or 3.5 percent.”
“But the point is, it won’t have been enough to stop inflation. It’ll cool it off, but they won’t want to have an epic recession. I’m not even sure they can pull that off,” the economist lamented.
Rogoff went on to predict that inflation would slow to around 3.5 to 4 percent next year and eventually return to a normal level of around 2 percent in a couple of years — assuming no other major problems had arisen in that time.
“There is both a supply problem and a demand problem. Let’s understand that, when the Biden administration came in, no one knew what to do, I’m not saying we know what should have been done. It’s not clear,” he added. “But, now we know they were pouring buckets of fuel on the fire, with these — the inflation fire with [this] massive stimulus. And that’s really the situation we’re in in the United States. And it just takes time to dig your way out.”
Biden shifts blame; the majority view inflation as a “very big problem”
President Biden delivered a speech Tuesday full of dizzying spin on the economy in which he acknowledged the pain many Americans were feeling from inflation but dodged all accountability for it, and instead cast all blame on the coronavirus pandemic, former President Donald Trump, Republicans in Congress, oil companies, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin.
And, when specifically asked if he felt any responsibility for inflation due to his policies, Biden replied that “our policies help, not hurt,” and insisted that rising prices were “not because of spending.”
While some Americans may buy the excuses Biden is selling, most likely will not, as recent polling from Pew Research Center showed that the overwhelming majority of Americans view inflation is the biggest and most serious problem facing the United States right now.
In fact, 70 percent rate inflation as a “very big” problem while 23 percent said it is a “moderately big” problem and another 6 percent believe it to be a “small” problem. Further, of those who say inflation is a “very big” problem, that figure is bipartisan and actually includes 57 percent of Democrats and Dem-leaning independents as well as 84 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents.
