Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes joined today by David French and Jonah Goldberg

We are Sarah Iskerlis

today as we record so we will be a lot less smart and a lot less provocative

We talk about GDP numbers and the economy is growing at a

Paltry 1.4% down from 6.9% shrank by 1.4%

inflation rate is 8.5% this is not an economy that is likely to see a lot of

Democrats get elected in 2022 something we already knew but I think this drives

at home even more and has democratic strategists and democratic elected

officeholders panicking how much blame does Joe Biden deserve for the current state

of the economy David well you know we're we're talking about I would say a

moderate to it's certainly not insignificant level of blame if you're talking

about inflation you know we were talking in the green morning beforehand that

we've seen estimates that between 2 and 4% of inflation is due to the last big

burst of spending so that last big burst of spending did make a difference

I've never won who sort of lays the entire economy at a president's feet

there are business cycles there are world events like the Russian

invasion of Ukraine that obviously impact this but the last thing we needed

after an enormous blast of spending during the height of the pandemic was

another enormous blast of spending in the last year and they wanted to do

much more than that a lot more than that and and at this point it's now you

know essentially received conventional wisdom that this enormous amount of

spending had this effect you know I we've mentioned it before on this podcast I

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