Within a week of White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s reported retirement, President Joe Biden said Thursday that top economic adviser Brian Deese is also leaving.
Biden commended Deese, the director of the National Economic Council, with contributing to the drafting of significant legislation that has defined the 46th president’s tenure to far.
“Brian’s work was critical to the passage of the most significant economic agenda in generations: the American Rescue Plan, which brought our economy back from the brink; the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law [and] the most significant investment in our nation’s infrastructure in generations,” Biden in a statement.
The president also praised Deese for his involvement in “the CHIPs and Science Act, which ensures we make more high-end technology here at home so we can outcompete the world; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which is giving millions of families breathing room, investing in clean energy manufacturing, and addressing the climate crisis.”
The New York Times reported that experts linked the 40-year high inflation increase under Biden to the March 2021 passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
The Act featured extended unemployment benefits, direct deposit monthly child tax credit payments, and food stamps, as well as other measures that, according to some analysts, discouraged individuals from returning to the workforce, so increasing labor shortages.
In January 2021, when Biden became president, the economy was well on its path to recovery. In April 2020, the jobless rate had decreased from a pandemic high of 14.7 percent to 6.3 percent. Currently, it’s at 3.5 percent.
In an opinion piece for The Washington Post published in February 2021, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers stated that approval of the American Rescue Plan would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.”
After it passed, Summers called it “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years.”
In a November 2021 piece for the Times, former Obama administration Treasury Department official Steven Rattner labeled the American Rescue Plan as the “original sin” causing the high inflation rate, which peaked at almost 9 percent in June and was 6.5 percent last month.
Rattner noted that he and Summers, along with “many other” economists, “feared that pouring an unprecedented level of expenditure into an economy already on the road to recovery would result in too much money chasing too few commodities.”
In May, Deese’s predecessor, Larry Kudlow, who served as director of Donald Trump’s National Economic Council, contended that this was the case.
More on this story via The Western Journal:
“The tax hikes and the environmental restrictions [under Biden] are suppressing the supply side of the economy — not enough goods. And the spending increases the demand side of the economy — too much cash,” Kudlow observed.CONTINUE READING…