Rising inflation in the U.S. and around the world is costing consumers more in daily expenses. Recent polls find that the issue of inflation and rising prices are one of the top concerns of Americans contributing to President Joe Biden’s declining popularity.
Inflation was also recently cited by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, as one of the reasons he recently announced on Fox News that after more than five months of negotiations, he’s now opposed to Biden’s Build Back Better $1.75 trillion social infrastructure funding bill.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who discusses his recent article titled, “The Media’s War Against Biden Over Inflation.” In the piece Baker explains why he believes corporate media’s distorted reporting on the inflation issue has had a direct impact on Biden’s poll numbers – less than a year ahead of critical 2022 congressional midterm elections.
DEAN BAKER: First off, there’s been an effort to blame Biden, and I understand the Republicans doing that. I understand that less coming from the New York Times or National Public Radio.
The reality is inflation has been worldwide, so we see a big jump in inflation, not just in the United States, Germany, England, Spain and many other countries. This is associated with reopening from the pandemic. So, yeah, we could have maintained 20 percent unemployment, and I’m sure the inflation rate would be somewhat lower.
But we had much of the world economy shut down in 2020. We opened up very quickly and I think we should all be happy about that. We got the unemployment rate down to 4.2 percent, which is a very low level. You wouldn’t know that from the media, but that’s the reality.
And as a result of that, that’s led to inflation again — not just here in the United States — but around the world because we have these supply chain problems. You had producers in a number of areas, oil just the most visible. They shut down much of their operations in the pandemic. Suddenly, the demand is back and they’re not prepared to meet that. So that’s an important part of the story.
The other part that the media has just really been outrageous on is they’ve had several pieces where they find people who are either not being truthful or incredibly atypical. So I’m thinking there’s a piece on CNN that got a lot of attention. This person buys 12 gallons of milk a week. That’s an awful lot of milk by my reckoning. And furthermore, they say the price of milk has gone up — I think they had 25 or 30 percent. Well, we have data on the price of milk going up about 4 percent. So I have no idea what these people pay. Who knows?
But if that’s true, they’re incredibly atypical, both in the amount of milk they drink, but also that they somehow are paying way more than everyone else. New York Times did the same thing with gas. They found a guy who seemed to, if you backed up the calculations, bought like 30 gallons of gas a week, a typical person would buy 10. So, yeah, if you buy 30 gallons of gas a week, then you’re very hard hit by the rise in gas prices.
So this is just incredibly irresponsible reporting. I should also add that they’re saying how these people, you know, they’ve had other pieces like this, that moderate income people can’t afford Christmas shopping, that their standard of living is falling. Well, wages at the lower end of the pay scale have risen very rapidly, so workers in hotels, workers in restaurants, they’re seeing very large pay increases, far outstripping inflation. So basically, you’re constructing a world that’s totally out of touch with reality and presenting it to people as fact. And it isn’t.
SCOTT HARRIS: So your point here is that inflation is real, of course it’s real. It’s there, but it’s being exaggerated by the media. In your estimation, what’s the motive here in terms of the media? Generally speaking, the corporate media’s focus on inflation and the exaggerated reports that you’ve covered in your article?
DEAN BAKER: You know, I really can’t speak to their motives. I mean, I could speculate, obviously, like anyone else can. My guess is that the vast majority of the people doing the reporting were not Trump supporters and maybe they feel a need to be “balanced.”
They said a lot of bad things about Trump because, you know, if you’d reported about Trump, honestly, you said bad things about him — not doing testing because you didn’t want to show that people there the coronavirus was spreading.
Report the facts. That’s really, really bad. And you could just find any number of things like that about Trump — of course, organizing the insurrection, refusing to arrange the election. I mean, the list could go on endlessly. So reporting the world accurately meant you said bad things about Trump.
They may feel the need to do the same about Biden that we have to be balanced, so we have to say bad things about Biden. I did. You know, I’m shooting in the dark here. I mean, I’ll let them speak for their own motives.
I’m just going to say the reality — they’re reporting inflation in a way that’s simply not true.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Dean, I did want to ask you about 2022 and what the economy’s going to look like a year from now.
DEAN BAKER: I think it’s going to look very good. I mean, I mentioned before with 4.2 percent unemployment, that’s almost certain to fall. I mean, almost every economist would agree with that. That means we’re getting to the lowest unemployment levels we’ve seen in 50 years, which is great news.
I think we’ll continue to see a tight labor market where workers feel they could quit their job. If they don’t like it, they can get some pay increases again, particularly at the bottom end. That’s where low unemployment has the biggest impact.
And I think inflation will come down to levels that most people will again, people always find things to complain about, but that most people consider acceptable.
SCOTT HARRIS: What factor traditionally has the state of the economy played in midterm elections? There’s a lot of concern about the same people who wanted to overthrow the government taking over the House and Senate next year.
DEAN BAKER: Well, what tends to be an important factor is the president’s popularity. Where you have a popular president, their party tends to do better in midterm elections; where they’re not popular, they lose seats, and the popularity of the president depends on the economy.
So if we have a strong economy, I expect Biden’s popularity to come back. It has gone up a little bit in the last few weeks. Still not great. But it’s been a 43-44 and had been around 40 polls that I saw. So it’s going up some and I expect to go more, so not making a prediction about the 2022 elections. But I think things will look much better for the Democrats come November than they do today.
For more information on Center for Economic and Policy Research, visit cepr.net.
