CNN anchor Jake Tapper confronted Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Sunday over the country’s rising inflation, but could not get her to admit, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen did, that she underestimated how bad it would get.
“As recently as six months ago, you were calling inflation a ‘short-term problem, not a long-term problem,’” Tapper said. “So you got it wrong, too.”
Raimondo, appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, told Tapper the country could not have predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine would drive up gas prices or the long-term impact of the COVID-19 recovery.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We will get inflation under control, we just have to stick with it and see it through,” Raimondo said. “The reality is, the cause of this inflation is the supply-chain problems that were caused by COVID we’re still struggling with. Putin’s war is driving the price of food and gas up. And—we can't deny that. We know Americans are struggling.”
Raimondo then claimed Larry Summers had said that inflation is coming down, although what Summers actually said, on Twitter, is that an impending recession may not be as bad as the 2008 financial crisis. That led Tapper to question why the Biden administration was quoting Summers now when it had previously dismissed his criticism of the American Rescue Plan as an inflation fueler.
“Larry Summers, a year ago, more than a year ago, was saying that the Biden administration was putting too much money into the economy flooding too much money into the economy. And he was concerned about inflation,” Tapper pressed. “And Biden administration officials said that Larry Summers was wrong, and it turned out Larry Summers was right.”
