CNN, to no one’s surprise, tried to play Gotcha! by claiming President Donald Trump was “bucking” his campaign promise to cut prices immediately upon taking office, and ended up making the network look more idiotic than it already does. That is a feat unto itself.
CNN took aim at Trump’s recent interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity where he stated that “‘Inflation is back.’”
He continued: “I had nothing to do with it. These people have — have run the country. They spent money like nobody has ever spent.”
After CNN Business Executive Editor David Goldman conceded Trump was correct in some respects, he then took a nosedive into the logical toilet and pulled the flush lever: “Trump’s argument that Biden is to blame for inflation is up for debate.”
Then it just got worse: “So the jury is decidedly out on how much federal spending contributed to inflation — if at all.”
Did Goldman write this after dropping acid? This is like saying the jury is still out on whether communist China is responsible for the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The MIT Sloan School of Management admitted in July 2024 that “some policymakers — up to and including President Joe Biden — blamed shortages in the supply chain. But a new study shows that federal spending was the cause — significantly so.”
Senior MIT Senior Lecturer of Finance Mark Kritzman, one of the authors of the research, added: “Our research shows mathematically that the overwhelming driver of that burst of inflation in 2022 was federal spending, not the supply chain.”
Goldman even conceded that “Some economists, including former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, have in part blamed the substantial spending for overheating the economy.”
Strangely enough, President Barack Obama’s former National Economic Council Director Larry Summers wasn’t mentioned once in Goldman’s nutty piece. That’s despite the fact that Summers was one of the prominent voices warning Biden’s spending would hurl the U.S. into an inflation crisis since February 2021.
Goldman’s wanton assumption that only “some” economists were making this is also a flat-out lie.
In fact, USA Today ran a November 2024 piece answering the question whether government spending was contributing to inflation: “Yes, economists say: government spending can definitely cause inflation. Many economists say federal spending caused at least some of the inflation crisis in 2022.”
“Many” is miles away from just “some,” eh Goldman?
But Goldman pivoted to a National Bureau of Economic Research which admitted the inflationary effects of Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package and other policies. But, chirped Goldman, “the same report also blamed the price hikes on factors including higher production costs linked to swings in demand, the war in Ukraine and Covid-era supply trouble.”
Too bad that MIT and Summers himself already previously nuked those misleading talking points.
Goldman even twisted the findings of a bizarre International Monetary Fund report that tried to emphasize supply shocks over macroeconomic factors federal spending as the drivers of inflation globally.
The IMF report, alleged by Goldman, showed that “macroeconomic effects like federal spending weren’t to blame at all — instead it was just old-fashioned supply and demand.”
Here was the part from the IMF report that Goldman left out:
The United States is a significant exception. The contribution of broad macroeconomic tightness to inflation remains greater than in other economies despite the significant cooling of the labor market since early 2023.
Goldman concluded his nonsense by attacking Trump’s tariff proposals: “Raising taxes on imports will ultimately cost the American consumers who will be left footing the bill, economists largely agree.”
How Goldman could insinuate this in light of the fact that consumer prices have surged 23 percent of what they were since Biden first took office is just a textbook case of irony in the first degree.
Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni wrote on February 5 that these kinds of drummed-up fears over Trump’s tariffs by the media are “a fallacy, by both economic theory and the record of history. Factors such as changes in exchange rates mean that foreign producers typically end up paying some (or most) of a tariff.”
During America’s Golden Age, as Antoni pointed out, “the government essentially funded itself entirely with tariffs; the income tax didn’t even exist. Instead of tariffs wreaking untold economic calamity, they coincided with our fastest sustained levels of growth—a time that built America’s middle class.”
But did Goldman mention any of this context? Nope, instead he tried to pass the buck on Biden’s inflation mess off on Trump: “So Biden may have contributed to America’s stubborn inflation problem. But it’s now Trump’s problem, and his most prominent economic policy may make it worse.”
