Kevin Hassett says Biden's early Covid spending still fueling inflation

Hassett's case on stimulus and prices

He called Biden's first-year stimulus "really the big mistake that we're still working our way out from."

Hassett said Trump's team aimed to replace lost income without overshooting. "We wanted to fill the hole, but not do more than that," he said of the first term overlapping with Covid's onset in March 2020. In contrast, he argued, "What Biden did is he took all that spending and he decided to spend it on other things, even though we didn't need it."

Addressing inflation, Hassett remarked, "When President Trump left office last time - talk about affordability - inflation was one and a half percent." He continued, "And then it took off when they helicopter-dropped money by keeping as a baseline the Covid spending, and that's really the big mistake that we're still working our way out from."

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How the politics line up

Hassett's comments landed in the closing stretch of a midterm season dominated by pocketbook worries, with Democrats looking likely to pick up seats in Congress. A memo from Senate Majority PAC that went out Tuesday morning tells Democratic candidates to keep affordability front and center. Drawing on battleground polling, it says messages linking Republicans to higher costs for health care, utilities, gas and other daily expenses outperform corruption-only lines of attack. The memo also leans on an August survey sampling 1,800 likely voters spread over nine Senate battleground states to urge Democrats to explain how policy decisions and corporate power drive up household expenses. As the memo puts it: "The strongest reason to vote against a Republican continues to be that they have raised our costs."

Inflation's path since Covid

In March 2021, President Biden enacted the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Many economists argue it added to inflation, though they still debate how much. Prices accelerated in Biden's first two years, topping out around 9% in the summer of 2022. Afterward, inflation slid to 3% around the time Trump moved back into the White House in January 2025, but it has crept up again this year, a development tied to the U.S. war against Iran and to Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine, both of which are straining global energy markets.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and his senior officials routinely defend their record by contrasting it with Biden's years or by ascribing current problems to the former president's policies. Nearly two years removed from the 2024 presidential election, that argument seems to be losing steam as polling shows more voters disapproving of Trump on the economy and overall.

What it means for your money

Affordability has become a central political storyline again, and that shapes what proposals make it to the finish line. Watch how campaigns talk about prices and which cost-of-living policies get traction, because those choices ripple into energy, health care, utilities and the broader inflation outlook that hits your budget first.

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