Fox News host Harris Faulkner corrected a former Democratic congressman Monday who claimed the COVID-19 pandemic was to blame for inflation during President Joe Biden’s term in office.
Former Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania made the claim during a Monday appearance on “The Faulkner Focus” discussing Biden’s struggles with black and Hispanic voters. Murphy defended Biden on the economy after Faulkner questioned whether “disenchanted” black and Hispanic voters would sit out the election.
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“It doesn’t automatically mean that black and Latino voters are… just completely disenchanted by Biden are gonna vote for Donald Trump,” Faulkner said. “But what it could potentially mean is, they’ll think about it. Some of them will do the one thing that we never want to see happen in America: They’ll just sit. They won’t even exercise their right to vote and that means Biden broke something in this country, and if he doesn’t just fix it for himself, Patrick, he has got to fix it for everybody else. You can’t leave it such that young people are outside the process because of your bad policies.”
“Harris, I absolutely agree with you and I agree with Doug [Collins],” Murphy responded. “The reality of it is, though, the American people have been put through the wringer. It was the worst global pandemic… let’s move on.”
Faulkner responded by pressing Murphy about the timeline.
“But the high inflation has been more recent than the pandemic,” Faulkner responded. “Give people some credit… particularly those people who got very ill and struggled and survived, God bless them, all right and now they’re going to vote based on how they’re experiencing a current presidency. Give them some credit.”
“I am giving them credit and they also give President Biden credit because inflation was 9%, it’s down to 3% and we have a lot of work to do,” Murphy responded as Collins scoffed.
Inflation reached a high of 9% in June 2022, almost a year and a half after Biden took office in January 2021, when the rate was 1.4%. Although the Consumer Price Index dropped to 3.3% year-over-year in May, prices have gone up 20.1% since Biden took office in January 2021.
On the economy, Biden’s average approval rating was only 40.8% in the RealClearPolling average, while only 36.8% gave him good marks on inflation.
Faulkner immediately responded to Murphy’s claim about inflation under the Biden administration.
“You realize he inherited 1.4 and didn’t have a pandemic in the middle of that, because by May 11th that first year, the president had told us the pandemic was over,” Faulkner responded.
