On Wednesday, President Joe Biden was widely mocked online after he posted a tweet describing his economic track record as the “strongest” of any Commander-in-Chief in the past half-century.
“We’re ending 2021 with what one analyst described as the strongest first-year economic track record of any president in the last 50 years,” Biden wrote. “Let’s keep the progress going.”
We’re ending 2021 with what one analyst described as the strongest first-year economic track record of any president in the last 50 years.
Let’s keep the progress going.
— President Biden (@POTUS) December 29, 2021
This claim was shared amidst an ongoing supply chain crisis and growing concerns regarding economic collapse and skyrocketing inflation.
“Which one was the analyst,” Greg Price asked, alongside images of various celebrities, social media influencers, and singing nurses who have recently partnered with the Biden administration.
However, despite Biden’s claims, economists are slashing their growth forecasts for next year, in part because of the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, despite Biden’s earlier promise to “shut down the virus.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi downgraded his first-quarter GDP prediction for the United States from 5.2% to 2.2%, as he “can see the economic damage mounting going into the first quarter.” He noted reductions in travel spending, as well as the cancellation of arts and entertainment events.
Meanwhile, Larry Summers — who worked as Treasury Secretary under the Clinton administration and National Economic Council director under the Obama administration — said during an interview with Bloomberg that the Federal Reserve’s recent monetary policy taper came far too late and shared fears that the United States has produced an inflationary environment that will require a recession to escape.
“If I thought we could sustainably run the economy in a red-hot way, that would be a wonderful thing, but the consequence — and this is the excruciating lesson we learned in the 1970s — of an overheating economy is not merely elevated inflation, but constantly rising inflation,” Summers said. “That’s why my fear is that we are already reaching a point where it will be challenging to reduce inflation without giving rise to recession.”
“I’m surprised by how low long-term interest rates are,” Summers continued. “Markets are foreseeing that we will do what’s necessary to contain inflation — and that process will be quite contractionary.”
As The Daily Wire noted, this isn’t even the first time Biden has made such an argument. Even after recent polls showed that the president’s favorability ratings regarding the economy were lower than President Jimmy Carter’s near the same time of his first term, Biden claimed earlier this month that the economy is stronger today than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a virtual meeting with the “Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force,” Biden discussed the “progress” the economy has made since he took office.
“Today, America is the only leading economy in the world where household incomes and the economy as a whole are stronger than they were before the pandemic, even accounting for price increases,” he said.
He then quoted an anonymous analyst who said that 2021 was the “strongest first-year economic track record of any President in the last 50 years.”
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.