President Joe Biden's official White House Twitter account attempted to brag on Tuesday via a created graphic about what a great job the administration had done in reducing the rate of inflation since it peaked over an astonishing 9 percent last summer.
Unfortunately for them, all the chart did was show that the inflation issue has occurred entirely under Biden's watch and still remains exceptionally higher than it was when he first took office, the Daily Wire reported.
It further backfired as it revealed that Biden's White House either views the American public with contempt as being credulous and gullible about economic news or are themselves entirely ignorant about how monetary inflation actually works.
In a Tuesday morning tweet, the official White House account wrote, "Great news: Today’s inflation report shows annual inflation is now at the lowest level since March 2021, and less than half of what it was last June. This is giving families real breathing room."
Attached to that tweet was a graphic created by the White House that featured a chart that showed the year-over-year inflation rate from around June 2020 until May 2023, and did indeed confirm that the current rate of inflation of around 4 percent was down significantly from its peak of just over 9 percent in May-June 2022.
Yet, the chart also tellingly revealed that the inflation rate, which stayed well below the target of 2 percent during former President Donald Trump's presidency, only began to skyrocket upward around February 2021, after President Biden took office.
In fact, the White House's own graphic showed that the inflation rate was at around 1.5 percent when Trump left office before jumping all the way up to around 5.5 percent by May 2021, after which it leveled off for a few months before surging once more in September 2021 until it reached its peak and began to finally decline in the summer of 2022.
All of that and more was observed in the absolutely brutal comments from other Twitter users in reply to the White House's post, according to the Daily Wire.
Some users sarcastically thanked the White House for proving that the soaring price inflation issue began entirely within President Biden's tenure but most called the administration out for being either blatantly dishonest with the American people about how inflation actually works or accused the White House of being ignorant of that basic economic knowledge themselves.
Multiple commenters took particular issue with the absurd claim that the reduced rate of inflation was "giving families real breathing room," a patently false implication that the reduced rate signified reduced prices -- which is absolutely not the case at all, as anyone who has been to the grocery store recently can attest.
Some users felt compelled to explain what the White House post conveniently left out -- that the reduced year-over-year rate of inflation meant that prices were still increasing, albeit at a slower rate than before, meaning American families are still paying steadily rising prices and, in fact, have not received any financial "breathing room."
That chart from the White House was based on the latest inflation news as reported by the Associated Press on Tuesday, which revealed that the rate of inflation for the consumer price index had slowed somewhat from 4.9 percent in April to 4 percent in May, largely due to falling gas prices and smaller than expected prices increases for groceries.
Yet, when it comes to the "core" inflation rate monitored by the Federal Reserve, which leaves out the more volatile food and fuel prices, the rate of inflation was only reduced marginally from 5.5 percent to 5.3 percent -- still well above that aforementioned target rate of around 2 percent.
The AP noted that economic analysts predict that the CPI will continue to decline over the coming months, perhaps falling as low as 3.2 percent, but expect the "core" inflation rate to remain stubbornly high over 5 percent, which could necessitate more interest rate hikes from the Fed in a seemingly futile effort to reduce consumer spending and job growth in hopes of taming inflation without also triggering an economic recession or worse.
