Breitbart economics editor John Carney said Wednesday on Fox Business Network’s “Kudlow” that “overspending by the federal government” under the Biden administration caused inflation, not tariffs implemented by former President Donald Trump.
Kudlow said, “Because Trump might raise tariffs or use tariffs as a tool to enforce reciprocity, they’re all up in arms saying tariffs will cause inflation but you say they will not?”
Carney said, “They didn’t cause inflation. They screamed about inflation when Trump was president last time around and we didn’t see it. It just didn’t happen. I tracked month after month these numbers, everything you could imagine, the only thing I found went up in price were bicycles. That may have actually been a metal as tariff phenomenon but for the most part television prices went down, car prices went down. We actually got inflation under Biden. So it wasn’t tariffs that caused inflation it was an over accommodative monetary policy from the Fed and overspending by the federal government. That is what caused it.”
He continued, “By the way, economists will tell you if you really pin them down and make them tell you the truth, tariffs can’t cause inflation unless they raise the incomes of the domestic population. Because where is the extra spending power going to come from to support a generally higher price level?”
Carney added, “We saw actually a lot of manufacturing shift out of China and China suffered. There was a Wall Street Journal report that said China suffered three types as much as the U.S. from those tariffs.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
