Biden Takes Victory Lap on Unemployment, Ignores Inflation

President Joe Biden hailed the latest jobs report as evidence his economic policies were working amid a faltering stock market and rampant inflation.

The Department of Labor reported that new unemployment claims slightly rose to 218,000 in the previous week, yet continuing claims, which measure the number of people out of the workforce for an extended period of time, dropped to 1.37 million, the lowest point since late 1969.

“America is back to work. The number of Americans who are forced to rely on unemployment insurance programs for their support fell to its lowest level in over 52 years,” the president wrote in a statement Thursday morning. “When I took office, there were nearly 20 million Americans on unemployment insurance to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. Today, that number is about 1.3 million. That’s millions of families moving from government support to earning a paycheck.”

BIDEN’S INFLATION ATTACK PLAN POURING ‘GASOLINE ON THE FIRE,’ EXPERTS SAY

Elevated prices across all commercial goods remain the single most important topic for midterm voters and a major liability for Democrats’ hopes of holding on to either of their congressional majorities. Biden reiterated Thursday that inflation is his “top economic priority.”

“My plan to tackle inflation is to lower the costs that families face and lower the federal deficit, and we make progress on this every day. The federal budget deficit has already fallen by $1.5 trillion this year, and I have proposed a plan to reduce it even more by ensuring large corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes,” he said. “Congressional Republicans have a different approach — their plan would raise taxes on working families and jeopardize programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.”

Biden and Democrats have taken to attacking the “ultra-MAGA” agenda in recent weeks to deflect from the impact that the president’s massive spending packages had on exacerbating post-pandemic economic woes.

“I think we can say with certainty that we would have less inflation and fewer problems that we need to solve right now if the American Rescue Plan had been optimally sized,” Wendy Edelberg, a senior economics fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution, said in a statement.

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Inflation registered at 8.3% in April, but core inflation, which factors out food and energy prices, rose 0.6% compared to the month prior.