WATCH: Hugo Gurdon on inflation hurting the middle class
Jack Birle
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Washington Examiner Editor-in-Chief Hugo Gurdon says President Joe Biden‘s catchphrases on building the economy for the middle class are “meaningless” as a new CBO report shows inflation is hurting the purchasing power of the middle class the hardest.
“There’s a real irony here, and you knew listening to President Biden when he talked about the bottom up and the middle out that it was just a nice kind of catchphrase, but it was probably meaningless. And the thing about this report is that it shows that to be the case,” Gurdon said on Fox News Live Sunday.
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“The prices between May of 2020 and May of 2022 have risen by 15.5% for the people absolutely in the middle. It’s lower than that for the people at the top, and it’s lower than that for the people at the bottom. So we know that this bottom out and the middle out is empty rhetoric. The middle-class incomes are not keeping up. They have been the ones hurt most, and the real problem for Biden politically is the fact that 90% of Americans describe themselves as being a part of the middle class,” Gurdon added.
Gurdon also attributed a weaker-than-expected showing in the midterm elections for Republicans as voters punishing so-called election deniers as opposed to approving of Democrat’s economic policies, warning it could become a blind spot for Biden.
“The thing about the midterm elections was not that people thought the Democrats were doing a fantastic job or President Biden was doing a fantastic job,” Gurdon said. “He’s a historically unpopular president, and people were citing inflation as the real problem, and 77% of the population think that we’re going to go into a recession now. The reason that the Republican red wave didn’t happen is that voters decided the more immediate problem was to make sure that they punished those candidates who were citing a sort of President Trump fiction that he had the last election stolen.”
He shared his belief that the 2023 economic outlook is uncertain, citing the Federal Reserve raising interest rates as helping slow down inflation but further warned doing so may cause the U.S. to fall into a recession.
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“The problem is that when you turn the screws down on inflation, you also make the possibility of recession higher and higher and higher. And the perfect threading of the needle is to end recession without causing recession. That’s a difficult thing to do,” Gurdon said. “If we can get through the inflation without recession then, yes, 2023 is going to be a better year than 2022. But that’s an extremely difficult thing to do, and most Americans and a lot of economists believe that we’re heading into a recession and possibly a deep one.”
Uncertainty is the key word economists are using to describe the outlook for 2023 as many expect a recession to hit, with a model by Bloomberg giving a 100% chance of a recession by October 2023.