Former Obama adviser Steve Rattner on Wednesday blamed the Biden administration's stimulus spending for the nation's inflation surge, which reached a 40-year high in April.
"We're all paying the price for having overstimulated this economy during the pandemic and putting too much money into people's pockets, which created a lot of this inflation," Rattner told NBC News. "There's no free lunch, and we're all going to have to pay the price."
While President Joe Biden has pointed to supply chain shortages and Russia's war in Ukraine, some economists have blamed the White House's $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, which Congress passed in March 2021, for rising consumer prices. Former Obama adviser Larry Summers warned ahead of the bill's passage that the spending could "set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation."