By Karen Stokes
President Joe Biden
“I want every American to know that I am taking inflation very seriously,” Biden said from the podium in the South Court Auditorium. “It is my top domestic priority.”
The United States is in a stronger economic position than any other major advanced economy in the world. At the same time, inflation is too high and is putting a strain on working families. The President’s top economic priority is tackling inflation and reducing costs for American families – so we can sustain this historic economic recovery in a way that benefits all Americans, according to the Whitehouse.
President Biden believes that instead of taking money out of middle-class families’ pockets, we should lower their costs, including in the following areas: Lowering Prescription Drug and Health Care Costs, Lowering Food Prices by Helping American Farmers Grow More, and Compete More Effectively, Lowering the Cost of Everyday Goods By Repairing Our Infrastructure, Supply Chains, and Manufacturing, Lowering the Cost of Child Care and Long-Term Care, Lowering Housing Costs by Building More Homes.
“I think there’s two basic ideas to lower costs, we’re going to bring down the federal deficit which has the effect of lowering costs across the economy. The President has already presided over substantial reduction in the federal deficit last year, we’re on track for reducing the deficit by a trillion dollars this year,” said Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, Bharat Ramamurti.
Ramamurti continued, “The second idea is we’re trying to go directly at some of the major costs that families face, a big one is gas prices. We know that gas has gone up substantially over the course of the year, unfortunately that’s one of the major impacts of the Putin war in Ukraine. The President is working to reduce that increase by getting more gas into the market. He has authorized the largest release of oil from our petroleum reserve in the history of this country. One hundred eighty million barrels in order to increase supply and reduce prices.”
“We are dealing with a historic, unique situation. We are coming out of a global pandemic which affected how goods are made and shipped across the world. It disrupted a lot of those efforts and made goods harder to arrive in the U.S,” Ramamurti said.
We are using every tool that we have to address that problem because we know that’s a key problem for American families. We are approaching this problem from the position of strength unlike many other worlds economies. The unemployment rate is 3.6 percent, wages have been going up for people across the board, particularly, lower income workers, Ramamurti explained.
According to the latest data the ratio of the debt payments to income that households have on average is the lowest in 30 years.