Biden twice makes false claim that inflation was 9% when he took office

President Joe Biden erroneously said twice in one week that inflation was at 9% when he took office in 2021.

In reality, inflation stood at 1.4% when Biden assumed the presidency in January of 2021.

Biden made the false statements in interviews with CNN on May 8, and with Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.

“No president has had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation,” Biden told CNN. “It was 9% when I came to office, 9%.”

In the Yahoo interview, Biden was asked why Americans are not feeling “wealthy,” and he said, “I think inflation has gone slightly up. It was at 9% when I came in and it’s now down around 3%.”

Voter discontent over Biden’s performance with pocketbook issues was front of mind with Pennsylvanians in a new Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College poll, conducted April 28 to May 7.

Across the age spectrum, voters indicated they have deeply negative impressions of the president’s job performance and his ability to lead on issues such as the economy. Voters favored former President Donald Trump to handle the economy over Biden by a 12-point margin.

Explaining Biden’s errors, a White House official told the Associated Press that “the president was making the point that the factors that caused inflation were in place when he took office,” adding that “the pandemic caused inflation around the world by disrupting our economy and breaking our supply chains.”

The AP further reported that inflation fell from 2.5% in January 2020 to a low of 0.1% in May 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country. It was already rising when Biden entered the White House and continued to go up until June 2022, when it hit 9.1%, the largest 12-month increase in approximately 40 years.

“I don’t know Biden’s motivations for saying the same untrue thing twice,” said David Kahl Jr., professor of communication at Penn State-Behrend in Erie who is an expert on disinformation. “Repeating it could be designed to mislead the public.

“There’s a chance his repeated inflation remarks could have a deleterious effect on the electorate. The more we hear something, the more likely it’s believed over time.”

The recently released rate of inflation for April was 3.4%, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The inflation gaffes were not the first by Biden during the presidential campaign.

In remarks on April 17 in Scranton and Pittsburgh, Biden said his uncle was shot down during WWII over a region of New Guinea where cannibals had lived, an account not borne out by military records.

At the time, Biden had been honoring his uncle’s memory while upbraiding former President Donald Trump for calling fallen veterans “suckers and losers.”

Biden said Second Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., known as “Uncle Bosie,” flew single-engine planes in reconnaissance flights over New Guinea for the Army Air Corps, established before the Air Force.

“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time,” Biden said. “They never recovered his body.”

According to a personnel profile report from the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the plane had not been shot down but crashed into the ocean, killing Finnegan and two others on the flight.