One year. A week ago, Thursday, Jan. 20, marked Joe Biden’s first anniversary in the White House. No matter how rosy of a picture he tries to paint about the state of our nation; no matter how many times he tries to shift blame to Republicans despite his party having unified control of the House, Senate, and White House, no matter how many times he exaggerates or lies about the effects of his agenda, there is one clear, consistent truth - working-class Americans are suffering as a direct result of the path Mr. Biden has led us down.
This week, as the Republican Leader of the Budget Committee, I participated in a roundtable to dis-cuss the state of our economy. It’s not a pretty picture. Consumer inflation was seven percent over the last year, the highest it’s been in 40 years since 1982. The producer price index – which tracks the change in selling prices for domestic producers – had the highest recorded increase ever at 9.7 percent. Inflation isn’t just a statistic for working families. It means it’s harder to put food on the table, gas in their cars, and medicine in their cabinets. Fighting to keep inflation low should be a top priority for every elected official, but economists agree that the agenda President Biden is pursuing would make inflation worse, not better.
The President promised that by passing his $2 trillion COVID package we would jumpstart eco-nomic growth, with his favorite economists at Moody’s predicting nine percent economic growth in the third quarter of this year. Economic growth sputtered to around two percent. The president promised strong job creation, with millions of new jobs created. Instead, we’ve created 1.1 million fewer jobs than he promised, and the economy has not added a single job from the record high we saw with President Trump in office in 2019.
To show what Missouri families are facing, I had Russ Gant, a small business owner in West Plains, join me for the roundtable discussion on the economy and share how Biden’s agenda has been affecting him and his business. Russ told a room full of elected officials from across the country how the Biden supply chain crisis is making it hard to remain competitive because it takes so long to get goods from our ports of entry. People are seeing the impact of the supply chain crisis when they go to the grocery store and see bare shelves. It’s more than just groceries – it’s every-where you look.