Fox Business anchor Cheryl Casone pushed back Thursday on former Obama administration official Marie Harf’s attempt to blame companies for inflation.
The Producer Price Index (PPI) rose by 2.1% year-over-year in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reported a 3.5% increase in the Consumer Price Index on Wednesday. Harf claimed that companies were part of the reason for the prices of goods remaining high, which was disputed by Casone as being “not true.” (RELATED: ‘Factually Incorrect’: Fox News Host Debunks Biden’s Claim That Inflation Is Lower Than When He Took Office)
“When Democrats … when the Biden team took office, we were teetering on the edge of a global recession because of Covid and because of, eventually then a year later, because of the war in Ukraine,” Harf, a former State Department spokesperson, claimed. “They did do things like raise interest rates to try and give us the sort of soft landing, we haven’t tipped into – I mean other countries in Europe are having horrific inflation, much worse than ours – so this is what I am saying. There are things that the Biden team did that prevented this from being worse. That is a hard sell to voters. Part of the reason voters are still paying more for a lot of good, particularly poultry and meat, it’s because companies, even as inflation has come down, are making more and more.”
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“That’s not true, Marie,” Cason, who discussed the PPI numbers on “Mornings with Maria” Thursday morning, responded. “That is the wholesale price story.”
“We have corporate profits across the board,” Harf said. “People are paying more and corporations are making catastrophic profits, so this is a hard political one because they are doing a lot of the right things in the economy, but it is hard.”
“The cost of the companies, their operations are costing more, their input costs are costing more, that’s the report that I did this morning,” Casone responded.
Biden has a 35.5% approval rating on inflation compared to a 62.2% disapproval rate, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls between Feb. 21 and April 9.
Inflation is down from a high of 9.1% in June 2022, and prices have risen by 18.5% since Biden took office in January 2021.
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