Fox News host Harris Faulkner corrected former Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy on Monday after he claimed the COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for inflation during President Joe Biden’s term in office.
Murphy made this assertion during a Monday appearance on “The Faulkner Focus,” where the discussion focused on Biden’s challenges with Black and Hispanic voters. Murphy defended Biden’s handling of the economy after Faulkner questioned whether “disenchanted” Black and Hispanic voters might abstain from voting in the upcoming election.
“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.” But the host interjected immediately by reminding the former Dem lawmaker about the timeline for the worst inflation.
“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.” Murphy responded, which led Collins to scoff: “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.”
Inflation peaked at 9% in June 2022, nearly a year and a half after Biden took office in January 2021, when the inflation rate was 1.4%. While the Consumer Price Index decreased to 3.3% year-over-year in May, overall prices have increased by 20.1% since Biden assumed office. Regarding the economy, Biden’s average approval rating stands at 40.8% according to the RealClearPolling average, with only 36.8% rating his handling of inflation positively.
Faulkner wasted no time in responding to Murphy about his claims regarding Biden’s economic policies. “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.
