Biden’s Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen testified on the state of the country’s economy before the United States Senate. “We currently face macroeconomic challenges, including unacceptable levels of inflation,” Yellen said. However, bafflingly, she went on to suggest that the Democrat’s outlandish ‘American Rescue Plan‘ helped, defying both logic and many of her peer economists who say it largely exacerbated the problem.
Yellen told the Senate Financing Committee that “disruptions” in the supply chain activated by the COVID-19 pandemic triggered inflation to skyrocket, as did the “effects of supply-side disturbances to oil and food markets” brought on by the Russia-Ukraine dispute, per The New York Post.
“There’s no question that we have huge inflation pressures, that inflation is really our top economic problem at this point and that it’s critical that we address it. I do expect inflation to remain high although I very much hope that it will be coming down now,” she added. “I think that bringing inflation down should be our number one priority.”
Yellen also told the committee that Joe Biden “inherited an economy with very high unemployment” and that “virtually every developed country around the world” is currently “experiencing inflation.”
Republican members of the senate committee consistently asked Yellen about the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion financial stimulus package Biden pushed in 2021 to attend to the economic and health results of the worldwide pandemic. The plan included $1,400 checks for each household in the country as well as numerous billions of dollars in aid to state and city governments.
Many economists have actually argued that since of the huge price tag of the costs and the fact that of persisting inflation issues in the national economy, the American Rescue Plan worsened inflation.
Democrats “thought they were still in the ‘money printer go brrr’ era, where there was less pressure to be judicious about where that money was going — so instead of targeting help to those who needed it, they sent hundreds of billions of dollars to well-off Americans and states doing just fine, for political reasons,” reports Vox.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that a soon-to-be-released book states Yellen had urged Biden to support a smaller sized variation of the stimulus plan of issue for the long-lasting inflation.
Yellen rejected this and aligned herself with the Biden administration.
“I never urged adoption of a smaller American Rescue Plan package, and I believe that ARP played a central role in driving strong growth throughout 2021 and afterward,” she said in response to the claim, per Axios.
A former chair of the Federal Reserve, Yellen was chosen to work as Treasury Secretary by Biden in November of 2020.
The U.S. inflation rate reached approximately 8.3% in April of 2022– twice as high as it was 12 months prior and approximately 7.9% higher than 24 months previously. Inflation is anticipated to climb over the summertime and could reach the same levels tape-recorded in 1980. In April of that year, the nationwide inflation rate rose to simply over 14.7%.
H/T Timcast
