Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich confronted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Monday about the administrati...
Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich confronted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Monday about the administration’s economic victory lap.
Heinrich argued that President Joe Biden’s claims that he lowered the deficit while former President Donald Trump’s administration lost jobs are both misleading.
“Today, the president seemed to be factoring some this GOP messaging on the economy and he told people that Republicans like to call Democrats big spenders and people should like facts. But the facts don’t seem to be exactly how he’s painting it on some of these issues. He has claimed repeatedly that the administration reduced the deficit, but if you break it down, spending was high because of the pandemic. Those programs expired and that brought down the deficit … and on the jobs claim that President Trump was the first to lose jobs during his administration and he claimed that he had created 10 million new jobs, but in reality, those jobs have mostly been added back.”
“How are people supposed to take this kind of messaging seriously when some of this feels like smoke and mirrors?” she continued.
The press secretary said that the Biden administration is responsible for reopening schools and businesses across the U.S. while claiming Republicans “refused” to make the effort to pull the nation out of the COVID-19 pandemic. She criticized congressional Republicans for vowing to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, a move which the secretary claimed will worsen inflation.
Heinrich then suggested that the Biden administration should focus more on that messaging rather than touting the drop in deficit spending.
“It feels sort of irrelevant,” she said.
“No, reducing the deficit is real. $1.4 trillion, that’s what he talked about just last week and that is historic as well,” the press secretary said. “In one year, that is what the president has been able to do. Those are real numbers that matter as we talk about inflation, as we talk about the economy.”
“It just happened on it’s own,” Heinrich argued.
Jean-Pierre doubled down and accused Republicans of ignoring the issue.
Prominent economists have predicted that the president’s pieces of legislation would worsen inflation and the deficit. A University of Pennsylvania Wharton model predicted that Biden’s student loan forgiveness program will cost over $1 trillion and the non-partisan Committee for Responsible Federal Budget (CBO) estimated that canceling student loan debt entirely would increase inflation by anywhere from 10 to 50 basis points (1 BP = .01%).
The CBO projected that the $1.4 trillion drop was mostly due to the halt in COVID stimulus spending. Student loan forgiveness, meanwhile, will cost $379 billion over roughly three decades and had added $341 billion more than anticipated to the deficit.
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