Most economists believe the inflation we're seeing now is a result of pent-up demand due to the pandemic, but that didn't stop Fox's Newt Gingrich from fear-mongering over a return to the stagflation of the 1970s.
May 16, 2021

Most economists believe the inflation we're seeing now is nothing to fret over, and a result of pent-up demand due to the pandemic, but that didn't stop Fox's Newt Gingrich from fear-mongering over a return to the stagflation of the 1970s. During a segment on this Saturday's Watters World, Gingrich was asked by Watters whether Biden "has the tools in the toolkit to recognize the problems and fix them?"

Gingrich responded by first trying to paint Biden as being too senile to hold office, before railing about liberals supposedly being soft on crime, the pipeline hacking (which Republicans have no intention of doing anything about, since they hate regulation), and saying we need to "rethink our entire approach to the hacking question," without offering a single suggestion as to just what that "approach" should be. He then proceeded to try to portray Biden as the second coming of Jimmy Carter and over-hyping inflation concerns.

GINGRICH: This feels more like Jimmy Carter than I would have thought possible. I think maybe it was the gas lines that were the final break through. You think about it, you're getting stagflation, which is what they called it when Carter was president.

That's when you have stagnant jobs and inflation at the same time. Reagan put that together into a misery index. He added the unemployment number and the inflation number, and the hidden... the underlying inflation numbers are stunning. At a minimum, the highest rate of inflation since 1982, and at a maximum, maybe even higher than that because of the way they keep score.

Now, you said something that's really important and I want to build on that, and that is inflation is a hidden tax.

The real Biden tax is this inflation, and it's making every American poorer. You are about 4 percent poorer than you were a year ago because the dollar doesn't buy as much.

And so, when Biden says says he's not going to tax anybody under $400,000, as long as you don't buy gasoline, you don't buy electricity, you don't buy food, you don't pay for a house. And go down the list of everything you're paying for because it's all being inflated, and I think that's a key part of this.

Can you help us out?

For nearly 20 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit, but now Facebook is drowning us in an ocean of right wing lies. Please give a one-time or recurring donation, or buy a year's subscription for an ad-free experience. Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon