Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that housing and grocery prices are too high, but he blames former President Joe Biden, who left office eight months ago.
“He [Trump] inherited one of the worst inflation crises in American history,” Vance told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “Housing is too expensive. Groceries are too expensive. I would say they are too expensive because we inherited a disastrous Biden economy.”
Trump and his allies have regularly claimed that he inherited a bad economy from his predecessor to justify the horrible economic numbers and rising costs Americans are facing due to Trump’s policies.
Economists agree that by standard measures, the US economy was in excellent shape when Trump took office in January. When Biden left office, the inflation rate had fallen to just 2.9%, down two-thirds from its peak, and GDP growth was rising at a 3.1% rate. Under Biden, the US added 16.6 million jobs, more than during any four-year term of any previous US president. At the end of Biden’s term, The Economist declared that the US economy was “the envy of the world” and had “left other rich countries in the dust”.
When Trump took office and implemented his mass deportation and tariff policies, the economy took a turn and hasn’t recovered since.
