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The economy in general, and inflation in particular, have been listed as key election issues for 2024. I decided to test whether the Inflation Reduction Act, the signature economic legislation from the Biden Administration, helped reduce inflation or not. I make the data available to you in this column since I know that’s important for people.

President Biden signed The Inflation Reduction Act into law on August 16, 2022. So I compare the time period before the Inflation Reduction Act was passed (September 2020 to August 2022) to the time after the IRA was passed (September 2022 to October 2024). If you believe that it should count two minutes after a bill is signed, instead of two weeks, I can’t help you there.

When Trump was president in the second half of 2020, prices were low (inflation was less than two percent), because fewer people were buying. We were also in the middle of a falling stock market and one of our worst quarters of gross domestic product in American history, so businesses slashed prices to get anyone to buy. Once the economy perked up with the vaccine being available during the change in administration, we ran into supply chain issues, as demand outstripped supply, which is why the global inflation rate rose, just as high as it did in the U.S. Economics 101 will tell you that with low supply and high demand, that prices will rise.

Sure enough from September 2020 to August of 2022, the average inflation rate was 5.346%. It got as high as 9.1 percent in June of 2022. That’s what led to this: “Former U.S. President Donald Trump claimed during the Sept. 10, 2024, presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that inflation was the worst it’s ever been under President Joe Biden.” Snopes rated this claim false. I checked for myself, and Trump is wrong. The Annual CPI for both 2021 and 2022 do not even make the top ten for Annual CPI cases just since 1929 (see Investopedia data for this). That doesn’t even count cases before Herbert Hoover took office.

By November of 2022, inflation fell from 8.2 percent to 7.1 percent. By February of 2023, inflation was down to six percent. By April of 2023, it was below five percent. By June of 2023, it was three percent. In September of 2024, the inflation rate was 2.4 percent.

The average inflation rate after the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was 4.256. I ran a difference of means test and found it was significantly lower than before the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law. You can run the numbers yourself from Statista too, if you’d like.

Short of a massive economic decline like the one we had when Trump was President in 2020 (we also had negative inflation during the Great Depression), that’s an impressive inflation reduction. Our GDP grew during the Biden Administration, improving upon 2020 numbers, the year before he became president.

So why isn’t the Biden Administration getting credit for this impressive economic success? Prices are still higher than they were during the pandemic, but nobody really wants an economy like the one we had during the pandemic, with negative growth rates, falling stock prices, and unemployment as high as 14.8 percent in April of 2020. It was 6.4 percent when Trump left office, still higher than the 4.1 percent unemployment rate of September of 2024.

The evidence shows that the Inflation Reduction Act did tame inflation in the U.S. economy. If Trump gets in and repeals it immediately, inflation could rise again just as it did from 2020 to the middle of 2022.