Amazon founder Jeff Bezos asked the Biden Administration’s new Disinformation Board to review the president’s tweet claiming that growing inflation could be tamed by raising corporate taxes.
Joe Biden, who has faced criticism over the 40-year high rates which hit 8.3 percent, tweeted on Friday that taxing corporations more would help ease the economic strain impacting Americans.
You want to bring down inflation? Let’s make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share,’ Biden tweeted.
Bezos responded within hours, claiming the president was conflating two seperate issues that only amounted to misdirection, and should be held accountable by the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Board.
‘The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead,’ Bezos tweeted.
‘Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection.’
The Disinformation Board was established last month to combat the spread of disinformation in minority communities and to provides communities with resources and tools to help prevent individuals from radicalizing to violence.
The board, however, has drawn much criticism as it was estblished ahead of the 2022 midterms, where the president’s party is expected to suffer major losses, and appears hypocritcal as the Biden administration has been slammed for trying to spin issues in their favor.
The administration had previously claimed that the war in Ukraine was causing inflation and gas prices to soar despite both already being significantly high prior to Russia’s invasion.
Rather than corporate taxes, interest rates have been sighted as the key figure to reign in to bring down inflation.
The Federal Reserve has begun raising interest rates to slow borrowing and spending enough to cool inflation following the height of the pandemic.
‘Inflation is much too high, and we understand the hardship it is causing, and we are moving expeditiously to bring it back down,’ Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on earlier this week.
In an interview with Marketplace on Thursday, he was asked what he would say to someone who will lose their job or miss out on a pay rise as the Fed tried to choke off inflationary spending.
‘So I would say that we fully understand and appreciate how painful inflation is, and that we have the tools and the resolve to get it down to two percent, and that we’re going to do that.
‘I will also say that the process of getting inflation down to two percent will also include some pain, but ultimately the most painful thing would be if we were to fail to deal with it and inflation were to get entrenched in the economy at high levels, and we know what that’s like.
‘And that’s just people losing the value of their paycheck to high inflation and, ultimately, we’d have to go through a much deeper downturn. And so we really need to avoid that.’
The Labor Department’s report on Wednesday said that the consumer price index increased 0.3 percent in April from the month before, for a 8.3 percent gain from a year ago, compared to March’s 8.5 percent increase.
The food index increased 9.4 percent from last year, the largest 12-month increase since 1981, and the energy index soared 30.3 percent from a year ago.
Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called ‘core’ inflation hit 6.3 percent in the 12 months ending in April, down slightly from March’s annual rate of 6.5 percent.
However, in a troubling sign inflation is becoming more entrenched, core prices jumped 0.6 percent from March to April – twice the 0.3 percent rise from February to March.
Those increases were fueled by spiking prices for airline tickets, hotel rooms and new cars. Rental costs also rose sharply.
Along with inflation, Biden has come underfire for establishing the Disinformation Board, which opponents ‘Orwellian’ and ‘un-American.’
Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy said on Wednesday that Democrats want to control the information that Americans’ are able to access through the new board.
‘Do they not trust Americans enough that they want to control that much of our lives?’ the Republican House leader questioned during a press briefing on the new Homeland Security board.
‘We watched it time and again,’ McCarthy continued. ‘Why would they want to control the information? Because they don’t want you to know the truth.’
He claimed that Democrats are trying to conceal information pushed by the right, which leftists deem are likely all conspiracies. McCarthy says this includes distracting from record-high inflation and the facts surrounding COVID-19.
Republicans immediately denounced the new board, headed by so-called Russian misinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, as the dystopian ‘Ministry of Truth’ from George Orwell’s novel 1984.
‘The president’s Ministry of truth is an un-American abuse of power,’ McCarthy said during a press briefing with other GOP lawmakers, including pro-MAGA Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Jim Jordan of Ohio.
Boebert said at the press briefing at the Capitol on Wednesday: ‘Make no mistake, free speech is under attack here in America.’
The board’s head, Nina Jankowicz, was also slammed by Republicans for a slew of previous comments that clearly show her bias against Donald Trump and her pushing now debunked claims about ties between the former president’s campaign and Russia.
‘She actively promoted information that was false,’ McCarthy said of Jankowicz, claiming her new ‘role’ is to ‘monitor information’ and decide what Americans should believe is true.