Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. Happy to be joined today by Senator Mitt Romney,

where we talked about a number of things in a relatively short amount of time. We covered

the economy, Joe Biden's performance on the economy, inflation, student debt cancellation,

Russia, JD Vance's victory in Ohio, and several other topics as well.

Senator Romney, thanks for joining the dispatch podcast. Thank you, Steve. Good to be with you.

I want to start by reading the opening paragraph of your recent Wall Street Journal op-ed and then

asking you to talk about it a little bit. You wrote three factors combined during the past two

years to create the perfect economic storm. COVID-19 scrambled the U.S. economy supply lines. The

Federal Reserve kept its foot on the accelerator way too long. And the Biden administration did

pretty much everything wrong, injecting $1.9 trillion into a supply constrained economy,

sending out state home checks, letting tenants live rent-free, squeezing oil and gas production,

launching an avalanche of growth-killing regulations, lining up behind unions and pushing yet another

deficit-financed budget. Wow. That was tough. The Biden administration did pretty much everything

wrong. Of those three factors, how much blame do you assign to President Biden for the situation

we're in right now? Well, a healthy dose, of course, of the blame goes there. But of course,

the Federal Reserve is primarily responsible for maintaining the integrity of our monetary system.

They were far too loose, far too long. My guess is that would not have been the problem it was,

but for the fact that COVID threw off the supply chain in ways that were far more extreme than

any would have anticipated. But then added to that, you had the President do a couple of things that

really added fuel to the fire. One was the $1.9 trillion that went out of March, and that was just

after the $900 billion that had gone out in January. So just a couple of months after $900

billion went out, he set out $1.9 trillion. I was speaking yesterday with the Secretary of Health

...