On Friday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg responded to a question on whether the Biden administration can claim credit for improvements in inflation numbers after previously blaming other factors like Russia and “Putin’s price hike” by stating that “we responded with the recipe of the things that we were doing” while acknowledging there are “a lot of things that go into this.”
Co-host Joe Kernen asked, “[I]nflation, it’s coming down now, and the administration and President Biden [are] going to take credit for it coming down. My only question is, whenever we talked about it in the past, it was never anyone’s fault that inflation was bad here. It wasn’t the spending during COVID. It was the entire globe, it’s around the globe, we can’t — it’s Putin, it’s the Putin price hike, we can’t do anything about it, it’s inflation, it’s global. But now that it’s coming down, it’s like, look what I did, I brought inflation down. And…that makes no sense. It’s not logically consistent.”
Buttigieg responded, “I don’t think that’s quite fair for a couple of reasons: First of all, these international comparisons, yes, we pointed out that inflation in the United States was not something that was just happening in the United States, it was happening around the world. But we also pointed out all the ways that we were doing better than a lot of our peers around the world, that was true in terms of our economic growth being really the fastest among the wealthy countries recovering from COVID, and I think it’s true now in terms of us doing better in the fight against inflation than other countries.”
He continued, “The other thing is, whenever we were getting hit with those questions about what are you doing on inflation, we responded with the recipe of the things that we were doing that we’d think would make a difference. So, I think it’s totally fair game, especially since a year ago, we said, we’re doing this Inflation Reduction Act, and some people said, your Inflation Reduction Act is going to lead to inflation going up. I think it’s really important now that inflation’s going down, to point out, like, hey, okay, here’s what happened: We had a problem with inflation, we passed an Inflation Reduction Act, inflation is going down. How can we not point to that sequence of events, even while acknowledging — just as we did then — that there [are] a lot of things that go into this.”
Kernen cut in to ask if anything from the Inflation Reduction Act has actually been implemented.
Buttigieg answered, “Well, look, it’s definitely — you know, people were saying that this is going to cause markets immediately to respond by moving in directions that are going to be inflationary. Obviously, that didn’t happen. But the other thing I’d point to is the short and medium-term work that we’ve done as an administration addressing things that we know contribute to inflation. So, in my world, for example, in the transportation space, we talk a lot about supply chain issues, right? And making sure that we make the short, medium, and long-term investments. You deal with the supply chain issues, that helps keep shipping costs down. Shipping costs are part of what led to inflation. And I do think some of the work we’ve done there is paying off. Now, that’s not a mission accomplished kind of thing, whether we’re talking about inflation at large or whether we’re talking about supply chains specifically.”
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