Former Obama adviser Steve Rattner is now blaming the Joe Biden administration and stimulus spending for causing America to suffer through this massive inflation problem that has surged to a 40-year high just this April.
WATCH Rattner call them out while speaking to NBC News:
Rattner said: “We’re all paying the price for having overstimulated this economy during the pandemic and putting too much money into people’s pockets, which created a lot of this inflation… There’s no free lunch, and we’re all going to have to pay the price.”
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden continues to blame supply chain shortages and Russia’s war with Ukraine instead of trying to take more responsibility and fix problems at home.
Other economists have also blamed the White House for the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan that was passed back in March of 2021, suggesting that this has contributed to rising consumer prices.
Another former adviser of Obama, Larry Summers, tried to warn Americans when he suggested that passing such a big and irresponsible spending bill would trigger ‘inflationary pressures’ that we haven’t seen in a generation, as reported.
Investopedia described the American Rescue Plan as the following:
What is the American Rescue Plan?
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is a $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package designed to facilitate the United States’ recovery from the devastating economic and health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The nearly $2 trillion price tag makes this economic rescue legislation one of the most expensive in U.S. history. It one part of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which also includes the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan.
The package includes direct stimulus payments of $1,400, extending unemployment compensation, continuing eviction and foreclosure moratoriums, and increasing the Child Tax Credit while making it fully refundable. It provides funds for state and local governments to help compensate for lost tax revenues, money for schools from kindergarten through eighth grade to safely reopen amid the pandemic, and subsidizes COVID-19 testing and vaccination programs.
What did critics say of the American Rescue Plan?
Many were against another stimulus plan and suggested that the American Rescue Plan contributed to today’s inflation problems.
As reported by AP:
Critics say the latter set of policies has driven up prices by fueling consumer demand at a time when supply chains couldn’t keep up, sapping momentum from Democratic efforts to enact generational changes such as expanded education programs, subsidized child care and financial incentives for fighting climate change.
“The gamble was it would create a success that would make people want to do more,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard professor and former top economic adviser to President Barack Obama. “But it contributed to inflation that made people want to do less.”
“In some ways, that’s the biggest consequence,” he added. “It was a gamble, and they lost that gamble, and it hurt.”
Inflation hit 7.9% over the last 12 months, the highest in four decades, and Furman estimated that the rescue plan was responsible for about 2.5 percentage points.
Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, pegs the figure at 3 percentage points.
“We really didn’t need another stimulus. The economy was already growing rapidly,” Strain said, noting that President Donald Trump had signed two measures totaling $3.1 trillion before Biden took office.