On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” 2024 GOP presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that the final year of his 2024 GOP opponent former President Donald Trump’s administration “was a bad year for this country” and it started with Trump “criticizing nations like Sweden who took a more modest approach, kept everything going, reduced the panic.” And that panic led to massive spending that helped cause inflation.
DeSantis said, “I also just would point out I think the first three years, I think the economy was largely good under Donald Trump. I think his regulatory policy was good. I think his energy policy was good. I think his tax policy was largely good too. Clearly, I wouldn’t want to see individual tax rates go up. And so, we would want to extend those. But there’s kind of a narrative that’s developed in conservative media that somehow like all four years were so great. 2020 was a bad year for this country. And it started in March of 2020 with how they responded to COVID. He was criticizing nations like Sweden who took a more modest approach, kept everything going, reduced the panic. In reality, that is the approach he should have taken here. And so, that COVID panic really led to, not just the 2 trillion in the CARES Act, but then the 2.2 trillion in December of 2020. We’d never spent that much money. And people were saying at the time that somehow there [weren’t] going to be impacts, and you didn’t see inflation right away, but you don’t get inflation for 18 to 20, 24 months after you see those types of events. So, I think it was a combination of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, obviously the Trump administration, and then Biden came in and did another 1.9 trillion in March of 202[1]. But the government induced the rise in prices. That’s just a fact, and both parties have their fingerprints on it.”
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