Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) offered Fox News host Maria Bartiromo a lesson in inflation on Sunday after she suggested that President Joe Biden was to blame.
In an interview on Fox News, Bartiromo told Khanna that Covid-19 legislation signed into law by Biden "was the beginning of inflation getting stoked."
"Maria, just to be factual on inflation," Khanna replied, "there was $3 trillion of spending under President Trump. And yes, there was spending under Joe Biden. But it is unfair to say that it's just the spending under Biden that somehow caused the inflation and not under Trump."
Bartiromo interrupted: "Just to be clear, I'm looking specifically at the numbers and when we look at the inflation timeline, which was the handover from President Trump to President Biden. ... By the time that we got to July of 2021, inflation was at 5.5%. Then the Democrats led the infrastructure package. That was signed into law November 21 and inflation was up to 6.8%. By March of 2022, right after the invasion by Russia, inflation was at 7.9% and today we are 8.6%"
"So we're up to 9.1%, Congressman, with all of this spending," she said.
"But, Maria, you know correlation and causation are different," Khanna remarked. "You can't say that Trump sending stimulus checks in December of 2020 was not inflationary and somehow Biden doing in March was inflationary."
"What happened is we got out of Covid," he added. "And that increased demand and the supply was constrained and the Fed policy was wrong."
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