By Ben Ritz
The theme of the Republican National Convention’s opening night in Milwaukee was “Make America Wealthy Again.” Speakers one after the other blamed the Biden administration and Democratic policies for the high inflation rates that plagued the country for much of the last three years. But at the same time, delegates approved a new party platform crafted by former President Donald Trump that would actually make inflation worse.
One of the first planks of the GOP’s new platform is “End Inflation and Make America Affordable Again.” Although Republicans want to place the blame for rising prices on President Biden, much of the inflation experienced over the past three years was due to factors entirely outside the president’s control, such as supply-chain bottlenecks and the residual effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The primary mechanism by which the president can worsen inflation is by adding to the federal budget deficit: if the federal government pumps more money into the economy through spending than it removes in taxes, those extra dollars help bid up the prices of goods and services. And on this measure, Republicans could make a decent argument: policies enacted during the Biden administration added more than $4 trillion to deficits over the 10-year window conventionally used for fiscal estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.
