Plurality Of American Voters Blame Biden For Rising Inflation

A recent poll revealed that nearly four in ten American voters blame President Biden for rising inflation.

According to the Trafalgar Group’s Nationwide Issues Survey, 39% of Americans hold the Commander-in-Chief “most responsible” for rising inflation. In comparison, 17.7% pointed to President Trump, 14.4% pointed to the current Congress, and 10.9% pointed to the previous Congress. Meanwhile, 17.9% of Americans stated that they “don’t know” who is most responsible for rising prices.

Representing 39.3% and 35.6% of participants respectively, Democrats slightly outnumbered Republicans in the survey.

Among Democratic respondents, 27.3% blamed President Trump for inflation; however, 21.5% blamed Biden. While only 6% of Republicans believe that Trump is responsible for inflation, 64.3% pointed to Biden.

Likewise, independents overwhelmingly said that Biden is the driving force behind inflation. For those without a party affiliation, 35.5% hold Biden accountable for higher price levels; only 16.9% hold Trump accountable.

The Trafalgar Group’s poll was published as the United States economy sees its highest inflation rates in over a decade. Year-over-year inflation for consumer goods climbed to 5% in May. For producer goods, year-over-year inflation hit 6.6% — the largest increase since the Department of Labor’s records began.

Top officials within the Biden administration indicated that they are willing to tolerate higher inflation as a consequence of the President’s ambitious spending agenda.

As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed staff upon her appointment, the administration is willing to use federal expenditures as a means to address purported societal ills: “Indeed, the reason I went from academia to government is because I believe economic policy can be a potent tool to improve society. We can — and should — use it to address inequality, racism, and climate change.”

Yellen — who previously served as Chair of the Federal Reserve —  remarked that any inflation from Biden’s spending is likely to be transitory in nature.

“We’ve been fighting inflation that’s too low and interest rates that are too low now for a decade,” Yellen told Bloomberg News, stating that “we want them to go back to” a normal interest rate environment, “and if this helps a little bit to alleviate things then that’s not a bad thing — that’s a good thing.”

Implicating both the Biden administration’s fiscal policy and the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, economists from Deutsche Bank recently broke with Wall Street consensus to express concern about rising inflation rates.

“It is no exaggeration to say that we are departing from neoliberalism and that the days of the new-liberal policies that begun in the Reagan era are clearly fading in the rearview mirror,” wrote the analysts, adding that the “most immediate manifestation of the shift in macro policy is that the fear of inflation, and of rising levels of government debt, that shaped a generation of policymakers is receding.”