Watching Vice President Kamala Harris talk about her economic record would make even Pinocchio blush. It’s bad enough that she’s the second-highest member of an administration that has financially gutted the middle class. But she has the gall to claim that reversing her mistakes would somehow make the problem worse. That’s the definition of projection.

With a straight face, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has claimed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 would weaken middle-class America. Of course, she offered no specifics to support her claim, nor any evidence to defend her own record.

So here are the facts about how the middle class has fared while Harris helped (mis)manage the nation’s economy.

Annual inflation went from 1.4% in January 2021 to over 9% in June 2022. Just 1 1/2 years after the Biden administration took power and began implementing its radical agenda, prices were rising about as much in a single month as they did in the entire year before Harris was sworn in as vice president.

Because inflation has far outpaced wage growth, the average person can buy much less today than in January 2021, despite having a much larger paycheck. For the typical family, this has amounted to a loss of $4,000 in annual purchasing power.

The impetus behind this inflationary wave has been unprecedented overspending by the government, which Harris not only helped oversee but for which she also repeatedly advocated over the last 3 1/2 years.

Since she took office, the federal debt has exploded by over $7 trillion. The Treasury has burned through about another $1 trillion in cash reserves, for a total cumulative deficit of over $8 trillion. By January 2025, that number will breach $9 trillion, according to her own administration’s estimates.

The Treasury’s unparalleled need to borrow money has pushed up interest rates, including for the $35 trillion federal debt. Taxpayers are now shelling out an annualized $1.6 trillion just to finance this burgeoning debt.

For context, the Treasury paid $140 billion in June just for interest on the debt. That was over 75% of all the personal income taxes collected that month. Harris has helped oversee the worst deterioration of federal finances since at least World War II.

But family finances are also being crushed by higher interest rates, hitting everything from mortgages to credit cards.

With home prices and interest rates launching higher, the nation has been thrown into a housing affordability crisis. The monthly mortgage payment on a median-priced home has more than doubled since Harris took office, rising over 115%. That’s an extra $14,000 per year for the same house.

People are also drowning in $1.1 trillion of credit card debt, even as the average interest rate on those outstanding balances is near a record high. Families are now paying $240 billion annually just in credit card interest, without putting a dime toward principal.

These are just some of the reasons people widely disapprove of the current administration’s handling of the economy. Families can’t make it from paycheck to paycheck with today’s stratospheric cost of living. They’re going into debt and depleting their savings just to make ends meet. In fact, the national savings rate is now less than half what it was before the pandemic.

Harris refuses to take any accountability for her role in this disaster. Worse, she claims that a conservative agenda would do precisely what her agenda has already done: eviscerate middle-class finances.

Far from hollowing out the middle class, conservatives aim to hollow out the unelected government bureaucracy that has morphed into a fourth branch of government, actively subverting the other three.

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Instead of more spending and borrowing by the government, conservatives want this largess reined in and inflation ended. Conversely, Harris was one of just 13 senators who voted against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell because she thought he was too tough on inflation — the same Powell who let inflation hit 40-year highs before raising interest rates above 1%.

Harris is an arsonist playing firefighter, simultaneously pushing for more government spending and taxes on the middle class while claiming conservatives are the ones to blame for her failures. People would be wise to remember who set the inflationary fire that burned their finances to ash.

E.J. Antoni is a public finance economist, the Richard F. Aster fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a senior fellow at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.