As inflation ravages Arizona and Phoenix is rated “America’s No. 1 Inflation Hotspot,” Mark Kelly is furiously backpedaling. Asked today by CNN, he sought to point the finger at the White House and Joe Biden.
But Kelly was warned that voting for the reckless and wasteful spending plan that pumped trillions into the economy would do exactly this. Even liberal economists have been sounding the alarm for over a year:
- Larry Summers warnedin January 2021 that the ARP “would overheat the economy.”
- Summer wrotea month before ARP was signed into law that it “will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation,” arguing the bill was “at least three times the size of” what was necessary.
- Summers calledthe ARP “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and that “there’s the real risk that macroeconomic policy will be very much destabilizing things.”
- A month before the ARP was signed the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget concurred, saying the bill was “two to three times over” what should be enacted.
- Jason Furman saidthe ARP was “definitely too big for the moment” and followed that he didn’t “know any economist that was recommending something the size of what was done.”
- Biden’s own Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently admitted the ARP drove up inflation, saying: “…inflation is a matter of demand and supply and the spending that was undertaken in the American Rescue Plan did feed demand.”
Now that inflation has become the top political issue in the country, voters are furious at Democrats for refusing to heed these warnings. This week’s CNN poll offered devastating news for Democrats like Kelly: a majority say Biden’s policies supported by Mark Kelly hurt the economy, 8 in 10 say the government controlled by Biden and Democrats like Kelly isn’t doing enough to combat inflation, and majorities say they have changed their behavior like reducing nonessential spending, changing grocery-buying habits, and cutting back on driving.
“It’s too late for Mark Kelly to absolve himself of political blame for the inflationary tax hitting Arizonans in their pocketbooks. Every time his constituents buy groceries or fill up their tank, they are paying more as a result of Kelly’s reckless spending – something we will continue to remind them of until November.” -SLF Communications Director Jack Pandol