The Real Reason No One Is Giving Biden Credit for How Good the Economy Is Right Now
The Real Reason No One Is Giving Biden Credit for How Good the Economy Is Right Now
Sharp and sustained economic criticism from Biden's ostensible allies established a narrative of failure that has proved alarmingly resistant to reality.
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They conveniently underlined all the bullshit.
For example:
Highest rate of economic growth (reflecting even more of the wealth being distributed among the Uber wealthy)
Lowest inflation (not counting housing, healthcare, energy or food)
Strongest wage growth (maybe in nominal terms if you ignore the actual increase in the cost of essential goods and services putting people behind where they were pre-pandemic)
Biggest wage gain among lowest paid workers (who still make less than they did before 2019 and somehow overlooking that almost all the gains in the economy since 2019 went to a few specific billionaires)
Lowest unemployment in x years ( they just keep redefining unemployment so that instead of it meaning 'people who can't find enough gainful employment to pay essential bills', we limit it to people that have no job right now but did in the last six months and have made x number of applications while not collecting any income. It's a damn joke)
They say "accounting for inflation" but then you have to remember their definition of inflation does not count housing, healthcare, energy or food so it's nonsense anyway.
The wealth gap is wider now than 2018. I don't even know where this claim that people are better off or the wealth gap is shrinking comes from... oh they got a 6% raise and inflation in sensible terms (not even counting housing and healthcare but including energy and food) is close to 9%.
And the black unemployment rate much like the unemployment rate itself is a cooked number that ignores most of the people that are black and unemployed/underemployed. It just doesn't give a shit if you can eat, have a place to live or can afford to go to the doctor, it just cares if you have a job right now or if you recently did and are still looking.
I am on my phone so I haven't had a chance to look up the disability unemployment claim, but as someone that lives with and supports people with disabilities, this might actually be real. Remote work is a real social revolution and it is making lives better.
My point is, as long as articles like this used continue to use cooked books to justify rose tinted viewings they will continue to think Americans are just ungrateful and ignorant of how great things are.
Dishonest stuff like this undermines the credibility of revenue driven media and leads to blurring the lines between a community getting high on hopium and Trump's firehose of bullshit.
Do you have citations for all this detailed rebuttal? Even just explaining verbally why it is you think their inflation numbers wouldn't include housing, healthcare, energy, or food?
The fact that they specifically said that wages are higher now even accounting for inflation, and you're saying that wages in real terms are now lower because of inflation (without commenting on the discrepancy), makes me think that maybe you're just throwing out claims instead of having done your own detailed point-by-point analysis of what they're saying.
If you click on the inflation link to the treasury, it says it excludes food and energy.
And if you play around with this calculator, you'll see that food inflation is currently at 2.2%, the lowest it's ever been since February 2020, when it was 1.8%. Energy has had some wild fluctuations around a fairly constant mean, including a big spike after Covid, but it's currently actually back down to a negative 1.9%. It's actually pretty interesting to look at the different metrics on that page, because they all show variations of the big spike after Covid but the return of pre-Covid levels afterwards. Housing is also an interesting one to look at, just bear in mind that it shows pure value (i.e. going steadily up) and not the percent change year by year like the other inflation metrics.
So... the argument is perfectly accurate, and the numbers shown good economic performance, but because one particular metric doesn't include some numbers (because those numbers need to be excluded to do apples-to-apples international comparisons which is what they're specifically talking about there), let's throw the whole thing out and say Biden must actually doing a bad job because obviously the numbers that aren't included are bad (even though when you look at them they're not)? Kinda sounds like that's the argument.
Just because food inflation is low now doesn't mean that I can leave Costco for less than $200 for absolute basics. So, to your point, if they included food in the inflation estimate, it doesn't seem like it would change much. To the articles point, and the point of the comment above us, people don't believe the economy is doing well because they can't afford food.
Part of the point of the article is that wages, compared with inflation, have gone up.
There were people who couldn't afford food before Biden, and now even though he got handed an absolute economic shit show, there are quite a bit less of them than there were before. Surely that's relevant?
You're right. The comment above appears to be bullshit.
So when was deflation? If you're not worried about the inflation of previous years there must have been deflation. So when did that happen?
Or is this just more ignoring the reality of inflation to gaslight people?
It stacks, year after year, unless there's deflation.
I got a pop quiz for you
If wages have grown relative to inflation
Then has the stacked impact of the reality of wages combined with the stacked impact of the reality of inflation made it easier for the average person to buy groceries? Or harder?
To any given person, it'll just seem like groceries are more expensive. That's always true (because, they are) and when inflation has been high for a couple of years it'll feel really true and really tangible. That's why these "I don't know what you're talking about I'm struggling, fuckin grocery bills and rent" talking points are so relatable. Because almost certainly the person you're talking to will feel some version of that. And grocery prices are an easy touch-point to make it feel true.
But to a person who didn't have a job before, and now does, it doesn't feel like "the economic program" got better. It feels like they got a job. To someone who joined a union as those are making a start at a comeback for the last couple of years, or someone who was able to get one of those $15/hr entry level jobs that used to be impossible during and before Trump and are now becoming the standard, it doesn't necessarily feel like things are "easy" now. And of course you can't say Biden's really fully responsible for that all happening, because he's not.
If inflation at the grocery store is partly Biden's fault, though, then why can't the growth of unions and increase in wages at the bottom end of the scale be partly to his credit?
That's the whole point of the OP article. The reality is, those $15/hr jobs and that union membership came about under Biden, and the wage growth that's happened has been large enough to outpace even a couple years of massive inflation as Covid's supply-chain issues and government spending really came home to roost. The fact that the growth is actually larger than the pain, even with those challenges, is really remarkable. And it's weird that that's not really any kind of significant narrative in the media. And it's definitely weird that the inflation is somehow Biden's fault while the wage growth that outpaced it isn't to his credit.
Yes it's harder. That's the point. And deflecting it with, "why doesn't he get credit for good stuff?!?" Is bad faith. People are pissed off he's trying to gaslight them, just like you just tried to do with your example where people only pay attention to groceries. When in reality they know what's left over at the end of the month. They can see it shrinking. They can see the day where they can't pay rent coming.
Treating people like they're dumb is not a winning move in the Democratic party. It hasn't been one since my dad was my age.
Yes it’s harder.
Wrong. If wages have grown relative to inflation, then it’s gotten easier.
Right?
You're ignoring previous inflation. Again. Wages beat inflation just this year. They are not higher relative to inflation over the last few years. They are certainly not higher relative to the wage-production split in the1970's.
Since the beginning of 2020 wages are down from inflation by seven points. And this is after decades of losing ground. Weasel wording the numbers from 2023 where wages beat inflation by 1 percent to gaslight people is disgusting.
Inflation-adjusted wages grew by 6% in 2020, 8% in 2021, and 6% in 2022. Here's the citation. Most of that growth happened at the lowest-wage end of the scale -- inflation-adjusted wages for the top 10% of earners actually fell by 5% from 2020-2022, meaning for the average to rise, quite a few of people in the lower percentiles saw their wages go up.
I suspect that a lot of the Lemmy community is tech people in that top 10%, which makes the anecdotal "IDK things are bad for me and my friends" resonate with them. And fair play if you want to say that's a problem, I won't say it's not.
But it seems like you're just trying to create a narrative that wages for everyone have gone down, because of stacked year-on-year inflation, that simply doesn't exist anywhere in the data, even in any given year in isolation. What are you saying was the change in wages that justifies what you're saying? Where are you getting your actual numbers and what are they?
This is Business Insider. You really need to check the sources. And the OECD chart they linked does not show what they claim. OECD has a table for real wage growth. It's not nearly as fun to read.
OECD: Annual average wage growth
OECD: Table N2. Real wage growth of average gross annual wages per full-time equivalent employee
Now those do stop in 2022, which also makes BI's assertion in 2024 kind of suspect.
Food inflation of 2.2% now doesn't mean anything when it was 5% in 2023.
That's what's killing Biden. People are spending more at the grocery store week after week or they're getting less.
2.2% on top of 5% in 2023 on top of 9.9% in 2022...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/summary-findings/
Tru dat. My point (and the OP article point I think) is that the stacked impact of wage growth, especially at the bottom, has actually outpaced even the significant amount of inflation. And that the latter gets talked about all the time but not the former (which doesn’t have to be nefarious - everyone feels grocery price even if nothing has changed, whereas wage growth a lot of times feels like “well yeah but I got a new job, of course I’m making more now”).
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