Amid near record-high inflation, President Joe Biden continued to blame others for it Wednesday.
Biden denounced former President Donald Trump as the ''great MAGA king'' and Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., as ''ultra-MAGA'' for providing Biden with an 11-point plan to curb inflation, which sits at 8.3%.
And he did it by repeating a claim that even fact-checkers at CNN have debunked.
''Under my predecessor — the great MAGA king — the deficit increased every single year he was president,'' Biden told reporters at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers conference Wednesday in Chicago. ''The first year of my presidency, the first year, I reduced the deficit, literally reduced the deficit by $350 billion, first year.''
CNN had already debunked that claim, noting that Biden increased the deficit by $2.8 trillion. And even if that increase is less than the deficit increase in Trump's final year, it was still even higher than projected had Trump stayed in office, according to nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis.
Biden also returned fire on a war of wars with Scott, who had called Biden ''incoherent, incapacitated, and confused'' on inflation and should resign. He also challenged Biden to a debate on his own 11-point plan to reduce inflation.
''I call it the ultra-MAGA plan, Make America Great Again plan,'' Biden said Wednesday.
''If I didn't see the actual document, I'd think I was making it up,'' Biden continued. ''The ultra-MAGA Republican's proposal puts, here's what it does, it puts Social Security, Medicare — this is the Republican plan now, the only one out there — and Medicaid on the chopping block every five years.''
''My Republican colleagues say these programs to help the working class and middle-class people, that they say, that's why we have inflation. They're dead wrong.''
Scott told Newsmax on Tuesday night his plan gives ''able-bodied'' workers incentive to get back into the workforce and to contribute to the economy through income, spending and paying taxes.
via newsmax