Inflation Reduction Act Won’t Help Much Until Next Year, Now It’s About Showing Voters ‘We’re Listening’: White House

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks to reporters in Washington, on Sept. 6, 2022. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

The White House acknowledged that many of the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act won’t kick in until next year and said that, at this stage, it’s more about sending a signal to voters that the Biden administration is attuned to their concerns by “listening.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre made the remarks in an interview on Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” in which she touted the Inflation Reduction Act’s provisions that would, for instance, lower Medicare premiums.

Program host Wolf Blitzer reacted by pointing out that “a lot” of the actions in the Inflation Reduction Act wouldn’t take effect for some time, and so their potential benefits won’t be felt by American households until later.

“They’ll take effect next year,“ Jean-Pierre responded, adding that ”the thing that we are doing right now is showing that we are listening to the American people.”

The White House press secretary then used the opportunity to remind viewers of Biden’s roots in Scranton, Ohio, and that he “understood what his parents were dealing with when they were around the kitchen table trying to figure out how they were going to make ends meet.”

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, touted the Inflation Reduction Act at a recent event in Los Angeles, California, arguing that Democrats “are working to bring down the cost of things” while Republicans “are campaigning every day on an agenda to raise your costs.”

The president hailed the Inflation Reduction Act for capping the cost of prescription drugs and reducing Medicare premiums, while announcing that Social Security benefits are going up by an average of $140 per month.

Biden added that Republicans want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act and eliminate those cost-reducing benefits.

“If Republicans win, inflation is going to get worse. It’s that simple,” Biden said.

But a number of experts have said that the Inflation Reduction Act will make inflation worse, not better.

“They really didn’t name this inflation reduction act correctly, it should be exactly the opposite,” said Michael Busler, a professor of finance at Stockton University, in an interview with The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD.

The act will neither reduce the country’s high inflation nor speed up economic growth, he said.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania published a paper in which it was estimated that the Inflation Reduction Act would have “no meaningful effect on inflation in the near term, but would reduce inflation by around 0.1 percentage points by the middle of the first decade.”

“These point estimates, however, are not statistically different from zero, indicating a low level of confidence that the legislation would have any measurable impact on inflation,” the researchers said.

Jean-Pierre’s remarks come as the midterm elections loom large, with polls showing that Americans trust Republicans over Democrats on issues of inflation and the economy.