Republicans are comparing Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy adviser, claims that Carter does not deserve blame for the malaise of the late 1970s. He says: “What led to the economic problems was the built-in inflation, which we inherited from [former Presidents Richard] Nixon and [Gerald] Ford.”
That assertion is hard to square with the record. In 1976, the last of the Nixon-Ford years, annual change in the consumer price index was 5.8 percent. Here are the figures for the Carter years:
- 1977 6.5%
- 1978 7.6%
- 1979 11.3%
- 1980 13.5%