The Biden administration wants you to know that it really “regrets” misleading you by downplaying the effects of inflation for years and allowing it to run rampant.
Treasury Sec. Janet Yellen said on Monday that she regrets saying inflation was transitory back in 2021, a sentiment she expressed in January as well. “I regret saying it was transitory,” Yellen said Monday. “It has come down. But I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people.”
Never mind that the administration was warned about this as early as February 2021 or that it was clear by November 2021 that inflation was not, in fact, transitory. Yellen only now “regrets” her comments, which were either intentionally misleading or unintentionally so based on terrible analysis, because it is an election year. Grocery prices are 25% higher than they were before the pandemic, and people rate the economy as the top issue they want the president to address.
As Yellen has illustrated, the Biden administration’s strategy of downplaying the scope and severity of inflation hasn’t worked, so now they want to beg voters for their forgiveness. It is the same reason that President Joe Biden said that he wished he didn’t call his climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act,” even though that was a conscious decision Biden and Democrats made in order to pass a climate bill under the guise of addressing people’s concerns about inflation.
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Whether Yellen was intentionally misleading people about inflation being transitory or not, Biden knew exactly what he was doing. He only asked for forgiveness one year later, in August 2023, because people’s concerns about inflation hadn’t stopped, and Biden’s polling numbers were still floundering.
Through a combination of shoddy analysis and outright untruths, Biden pursued the economic agenda he wanted over warnings that it would make inflation worse. When that came to pass, Biden and members of his administration downplayed the issue hoping that it would fade away. Now that it hasn’t, and he remains neck-and-neck in polling with the man he already beat in 2020, Biden and his team want every to know they truly “regret” misleading people for years. It’s an election play and nothing more.
