Biden Starts Week with Horrible News - Blown Out in Latest Polls - Even CBS Shows POTUS in Awful Shape
President Joe Biden’s week is off to a rocky start as a new poll shows his approval rating has hit a new low.
Only 42 percent of respondents to the latest CBS News/YouGov poll approved of the way that Biden is handling the job, while 58 percent disapproved.
CBS News reported that the president’s job approval has “been hovering in the low 40s for months now, and that tick down does mark its lowest point yet.”
The survey was conducted April 5-8 with a nationally representative sample of 2,062 U.S. adult residents, and its margin of error was plus or minus 2.8 points.
While the Biden administration has touted a Bureau of Labor Statistics report on April 1 that said payroll employment rose by 431,000 in March and the unemployment rate declined to 3.6 percent, most Americans are unhappy with the overall economy, especially rising prices.
Sixty-three percent of survey respondents rated the national economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad,” and 69 percent disapproved of how Biden has handled inflation.
Among those who said the economy is bad, 86 percent said it was because of inflation, 82 percent blamed gas prices, 69 percent pointed to the shortage of products and supplies, and 50 percent said it was because of mistrust in the Biden administration.
There was a broad consensus that Biden’s top priorities need to be addressing the economy and the inflation crisis: Seventy-six percent of respondents said the economy should be a high priority, while 73 percent said inflation needs to be a high priority.
The annual inflation rate at the end of February was 7.9 percent, the highest since 1982, according to U.S. Inflation Calculator.
In the broader context, inflation was much lower under former President Donald Trump: The consumer price index rose 2.1 percent in 2017, 1.9 percent in 2018, 2.3 percent in 2019 and 1.4 percent in 2020 during the Trump administration before shooting up 7 percent last year under Biden, according to the BLS.
A healthy inflation rate is around 2 percent or just a bit below, the Federal Reserve says.
The skyrocketing prices are hurting most Americans, according to the poll.
The CBS News/YouGov survey asked, “For your family, higher prices have been …”
To this, 66 percent answered that they were “difficult or a hardship.” Only 26 percent said inflation was merely “inconvenient,” while just 8 percent said it had “no effect.”
The increases in gas prices have taken a big toll on Americans. The national average price of a gallon on Monday was $4.114, AAA reported — up from $2.864 a year ago.
While the pain at the pump has intensified since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Americans were already suffering.
The price per gallon of gas shot up from $2.379 during Trump’s last week in office in January 2021 to $3.530 the week before the Russian invasion, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
In a Gallup poll conducted in January, nearly half of the respondents reported significant hardships because of rising prices.
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