President Biden’s retelling of economic history could win a fiction award.

He recently claimed in an interview that inflation “was 9% when I came into office,” even though it was 1.4% at that time. Not only is Mr. Biden lying about the historical record, but it was his policies that fueled the inflation fire.

The facts are clear: Mr. Biden was handed an economy that was recovering at an unprecedented pace. Gross domestic product was rising at an annualized rate of $1.5 trillion. Annual inflation as measured by the consumer price index was 1.4%. A monthly average of 1.5 million people were returning to work as lockdowns were lifted.

Just a year and a half later, Mr. Biden managed to deliver two consecutive quarters of negative GDP—the traditional definition of a recession—while driving annual inflation up to 9.1%. In June 2022 alone, the CPI rose 1.2%, an increase almost as large as the entire year before Mr. Biden took office.

What caused prices to rise about as fast in a single month as they had over the course of a whole year? In a word, “Bidenomics.”

The president’s multitrillion-dollar spending spree has been paid for with borrowed money, lent by the Federal Reserve that dutifully created that cash out of nothing.

The result was trillions of dollars in new money without a commensurate increase in the size of the economy. That reduced the value of each individual dollar—a phenomenon we call inflation—and prices rose at the fastest rate in four decades.

It’s difficult to overstate just how disastrous is Mr. Biden’s record on inflation and what a baldfaced lie it is to claim inflation was 9% when he was inaugurated, not a year and a half later. 

Some historical context illustrates the point.

From the end of the Great Recession until Mr. Biden took office, the average increase in the CPI was equivalent to an annual inflation rate of just 1.8%, and even less than that in January 2021. But for the first year and a half of Mr. Biden’s presidency, that average exploded to 8.5% as he led the big spenders of both parties in racking up trillions of dollars in new debt.

Since June 2022, the average increase in the CPI has been equivalent to an annual inflation rate of 3.4%, with the lower rate largely due to the Fed creating less money for the government to spend.

That means the current pace of price increases is almost twice as fast as it was before Mr. Biden took office. While it’s true prices aren’t rising as fast as they were at the worst point of the Biden administration, today’s inflation is piling on to the previous price increases, compounding the pain for Americans.

The CPI has risen almost 20% under Mr. Biden, but that doesn’t even include some major expenses for millions of Americans, like the cost of homeownership. The monthly mortgage payment on a median-price home has increased a stratospheric 115% on Mr. Biden’s watch.

Unfortunately, there’s no end in sight for “Bidenflation.”

The president and his big-spender allies in Congress have already added $6.9 trillion to the federal debt, and his Treasury Department recently announced that it expects to borrow almost $900 billion more in the third quarter of this year alone.

Worse yet, the White House is pushing for a $7.3 trillion budget next year—a level never seen before—and all that spending will mean more borrowing and more inflation. That’s particularly troubling since inflation has already begun reaccelerating in recent months.

Mr. Biden’s Orwellian rewriting of history is not only an attempt to absolve himself of any culpability for inflation, but also to pretend that his policies didn’t cause the problem. That provides political cover for him to advocate more of those same policies, throwing fuel on the inflation fire.

Originally Published by The Washington Times