Fox cable hosts are doing the job of the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, by admitting that the economy under President Biden is strong. Bernstein joins MSNBC’s Ali Velshi to discuss the latest “expectation-busting” jobs report.
“Economy” is such a bullshit term here. What they really mean is stock market. The real economy is shit. Pay is shit. Healthcare is shit. Real estate is a fat hog that needs to get slaughtered already. When will the people be treated as Too Big To Fail?
Ehh, I think the economy is doing okay. Inflation is being controlled/managed. In some cases it's correcting itself.
Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The media in this country has been really pessimistic about the economy and blaming the admin--to the point it seemed intentionally misrepresented.
This economy could have gone the other way pretty easily especially with the billions thrown into circulation during the pandemic.
If we want to credit Presidents when the economy is bad, you need to credit them when it's good too.
If anything this admin should get credit for being stable and a source of order in all of the chaos--not the cause of it.
Ehh, I think the economy is doing okay. Inflation is being controlled/managed. In some cases it's correcting itself.
I have to agree. Some people are still certainly struggling, of course. Homelessness is still a problem in places. Many people still live paycheck to paycheck. But the economy isn't going to fully right itself in four years, especially with a hostile House that controls the purse strings.
Additionally, nothing has been done about greedflation (yet?). If Congress or Biden can figure out a way to force companies to stop tacitly colluding to squeeze more money from people, I would suspect more people would start to feel more optimistic about their finances (and the economy in general).
Maybe I should have quoted or capitalized “The People”. I mean the common layperson. trump, Muskrat, and their ilk aren’t “the people”. They are the storied “1%” that depend on social welfare from our government.
It’s about jobs more than the stock market. The report says over 350k net jobs added in January (more than double expected) and unemployment has been below 4% for two consecutive years (not seen since the ‘60s). Plus inflation is quickly dropping and the administration is lowering costs on things where they can, putting more money in our pockets. It’s legitimately incredible what’s happened with the US economy since the pandemic nearly guaranteed a recession, according to Fox News.
We spent THREE YEARS with media of all stripes gaslighting us about a supposed incoming recession any day now. Any day now, for three years, even when the economy was doing gangbusters. Bastards.
The numbers for the real economy have been good too. The median wage rose faster than inflation in 2023 and unemployment has been consistently low, people are finding work and finally starting to earn more. Obviously things aren't great for everyone but it's going way better than anyone expected and it's heading in a good direction rather than deteriorating further like when inflation was still out of control.
🎵you load 16 tons, waddaya get? another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me cuz I can't gooooooo, I owe my soul to the company store. 🎵
The economy is only booming for the rich, anyone trying to tell us otherwise doesn't care about our well-being. If it were doing well they wouldn't have to keep telling us, we could see it in our everyday lives.
Gas prices are down. General cost of living is stabilized. Unemployment is extremely low and the percentage of eligible workers on the sidelines is dropping. Wages are up for the lowest income levels and continue to climb despite slowing inflation. Black households, in particular, have seen a significant narrowing of the income gap, more so than they've seen in many many years. The percentage of women in the workforce is up and salaries are climbing for them as well. In fact, the post-COVID recovery has been wildly successful when you compare it to post-2008 with respect to the improvements for the poorest among us, which is precisely the opposite of what you're claiming.
Yours is purely an appeal to anecdote. The data is clear. Unfortunately, as study after study has shown, data can't compete with vibes, and we just spent the last two years with the MSM (not to mention social media...) telling everyone a recession was around the corner.
Housing costs are sky-high. Rent is ridiculous. Good luck ever trying to own a house. And yeah, cost of living went way way up and now it's "stabilized" there.
And to say wages are up is just laughable. I mean, yeah people are now being paid $15 an hour instead of $10, but what does that matter when food and housing costs increased more than that?
The data is skewed by the people that benefited from raising the price of everything during COVID-19 and then never brought the prices down.
The rich are richer and they are the measuring stick for the economy because they own all the news sources. It is dramatically worse for the poor now than it was 5 years ago.
I'll tell that to the out of control housing, rising food costs and the worsening healthcare coverage and quality. Man! So glad these few things you mentioned are superficially better. There's no problems now!
/s because you know someone is gonna take it literally.
If his is purely anctedote, then yours is decontextualized.
Gas prices are down.
Sure. Since a high in June of 2022. The last time gas prices were at this level was June 2021. And the time before that was October 2014. Which is to say, for about 6 years, gas prices were lower than today. And just looking at the graph, they were significantly below today's level. Just to note, they have yet to return to the levels before the precipitous rise stating in December 2020.
There maybe, as you noted, vibes, but they ain't wrong.
Unemployment should be looked at with, of course participation rate which has held even for the last year, and how long people have been unemployed which has been growing slightly for those unemployed for 27 weeks or more. This also doesn't address underemployment which disporporstely effects the young and poor. Underemployment colors one's outlook for stability in the present and future.
Thankfully, Biden and others in the administration have managed this far better than 2008 for the average citizen. Not having a recession is a good thing. I've lived through several. But that doesn't mean there isn't looming concerns. Inflation is still higher than the target and instigating further disinflation is uncharted territory.
Data, in of itself, is not enough. It needs to be contextualized to develop political and social narratives. Addressing people with condescension and dismissing their anxieties as mere vibes fails politically.
I stopped reading at gas prices are down. They are up .40 the last week.
The data is clear
The gaslighting is all thats clear. All the data conflicts with your claim. Homelessness up to the highest level ever recorded, housing is unaffordable, food is unaffordable, wages are stagnant, income inequality is the widest ever recorded.
Biden’s administration has done pretty well considering all the grenades the GOP had thrown into the road.
people who say things like this have never been affected by any former president or the current one in a bad way and most likely do not travel around the US in any capacity
how has the economy improved under Biden? make it make sense
was it that higher minimum wage he promised then told workers not to protest and ask for better?
was it the factory jobs in the south he touted where pay and work condition standards are lower?
was it his obama style communication relief that helped citizens with things like internet bills that is now ending that only helped with about $25?
was it that national health insurance he promised that he never mentions?
yes biden has done some things but not enough or long enough or at all in some cases
everything he has done has been quartered ass at best and never good enough and always blamed on someone else when he fails to deliver like every president the US has ever had
Did you miss the part about the GOP scuppering and hamstringing every attempt by the Dems to make things better for the people?!?!
Pull your head out of your ass and look at the ACTUAL enemy rather than blaming the Dems for not walking as far as they could if the hurricane of traitorous actions by the GOP was not pushing them back at every step.
Plus, like only her plane. How many millionaires fly in their private jet and they complain about her? Obviously they are teiggered. The bootstrap party sure likes to whine about dumb shit. Imagine if they put even half as much effort into anything productive.
It’s no different from them suddenly caring about the environment when it comes to EVs. “Mining lithium is so bad for the environment!” They post to Facebook from their lithium-battery powered cellphone.
I don't know why this guy's getting downvoted. Rent prices are at record high. APRs are through the roof. Groceries are getting more expensive every year. I'm even paying $20 more every month for car insurance. Sure Trump was worse but let's not act like everything is all sunshine and rainbows just because it's an election year.
Google seems t suck these days and I wasn’t able to find good data, but
I see historical graph of car interest rates peaking over 8% in November, but current advertised rates 4-7%
I see mortgage rates peaked in Sept and headed down. Most predictions I see are down or at least consistent - I didn’t see any predicting up
gas prices are much cheaper lately
my savings account t just went up again, I think it’s now paying 4.5%
Gotta admit it’s tough to sympathize with a $20 insurance increase when I just got hit with the double whammy of teenaged driver and new car. My car insurance is quintuple what it was a couple months ago😒
House prices to contract down to a realistic level. Rent controls such that the price of rent is not higher than the price of a mortgage (which gives you ownership of a valuable asset, a tenancy does not).
Probably because Fox only makes good revenues when their buffoons aren't in charge to undermine their narratives with utter incompetence and pure greed.
Fox needs its viewers to want to start winning, not to be winning. That's why Tucker publicly put a stop to the Biden "crime family" claims right before the 2020 election, and resumed right after it.
Their viewership does best when their claims are not falsifiable.
Imagine how much social and technological progress we could have made if half of our country wasn't dedicated to tearing it all down at every opportunity...
I think we've made enough technological progress for now. Social progress might include a better application of the technologies we've had for a long time though.
A lot of the Fox Business stuff is not crazy politically biased in the way the Opinion primetime stuff is. There's a lot of old rich white guy conservatism, like Mitt Romney conservative. They'll spin storylines as explanations, but not basic facts.
Just seems like people are talking past each other sometimes with Fox stuff. Same as the polling "even FOX is saying X Democrat is winning!" well yeah Fox's polling infrastructure is pretty good, it's probably because that candidate is leading.
I'd agree, but Fox Business has gotten much worse over the past few years. It has always been pro-business (duh), but it was rather reliable otherwise and had to be. The viewers cared about their investments and companies; a bias would make them unreliable.
They started changing and adding more and more right wing nutjob opinions to their reporting, though.
There are genuine grievances in the economy; most notably perhaps the affordable housing crisis. My home's value is so fucking inflated it's not even funny. It's not worth what it is appraised for; none of these houses are. Chronic homelessness is at an all-time high.
That being said — since we are going into election year — we need to frame this not as what we see but what Republicans would normally boast of if Donnie2Scoops was in office.
They'd be boasting about unemployment
They'd be boasting about low inflation
They'd be boasting about lowering gas prices
They'd be boasting about stock-market being at an all-time high
They'd be boasting about the GDP growth-rate.
So context matters. By the standards of what Republicans usually tout, the economy is thriving. Which means they've got nothing going into an election year... Which means they're fucked.
Consider that Democrats won a midterm election during worse economic conditions in what is historically a rough midterm for an incumbent President's party. Now consider the same with the risk of Democracy on the line, abortion rights, and a strong economy.
Republicans are fucked. (But still, get 5 people you know to register and vote). Hence why they're so desperately clinging to this BoRDEr cRiSis as their only issue that's sticking — and Biden just called their bluff on it.
There's quite a few places where right and left agree on some point, but not what to do about it. It's not Horseshoe Theory, because they only meet in a single place and then run in different directions. They don't come up with the same solutions at all.
Republicans say the economy is failing, Democrats do not, but the left also thinks the economy is failing. But the left think it's failing because it does not provide a base of support for everyone and would like to fix it. Republicans don't give a shit about that and would prefer to keep pulling the ladder up behind them.
This is the thing. We have objective measures of the economy and by those measures (the same ones we'd use to say a Republican is doing a great job) the economy is doing well.
The broader left becomes something of a useful tool for Republicans to use in election years during these discussions, because while Republicans agree with leftist feelings about the economy until elected. Afterwards, those same metrics they insist are incomplete or don't count are exactly the things they'll tout again to say they're doing a great job.
Leftists need to get an objective set of metrics together and then consistently grade all policymakers on them. I also think that it's not solely (or even mostly) up to the president to determine economic policy. Presidents have an effect, for sure, but it's largely stuff passed through the Congress that impacts the economy.
People of a certain level and type of education think data and policies mean more than sentiment and messaging. But for many,t he data is secondary. You can see my comment on gas prices and unemployment being rooted in data and vibes. But the vibes for most people are what matters. And the vibes on election day are what matter most to undecided voters. I don't think either party really gets the sense of dread that most people have and may never get it.
Which midterm are you talking about? I'm assuming you're talking about the 2018 mid-term when Democrats picked up 41 seats since they lost the House in 2022. But another way of looking at the last five midterms, you see the midterms going to the party that is not the president's. So I don't think that the 2018 midterms provide a great reference point for the presidential election. Additionally, those gains in the 2018 election have slowly eroded giving control in the house to the Republicans.
In 2020, all six went Biden by less than 5%. In the 2022 midterm, Republicans gained seats in the house from Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia. If those three switch to Trump, Trump wins with 272. Having a record showing in California or New York does little to help with these strategic areas.
I'm not too certain what matters to the voters in these six states, but in Arizona, the BoRDEr cRiSis, as you condescendingly noted, probably matters to them. In all six of those states, you'll need a get out a vote drive to convince people to vibe with Biden. Usually those people are young and have a little more free time. But not when they see a genocide unfolding in Palestine and the Biden administration being complicit. Are the Arab Americans of Deerborn, MI going to come out and vote for Biden and Tlaib again? Will Tlaib stump for Biden? Are young Blacks in Atlanta or Philly going to come out in droves for Biden? I don't know.
I don't know what ground work the DNC has been doing, but I hope they've built a trusted network to get people to the polls. Either way, I don't think the "Republicans are fucked". It think we are looking at a close election again.
Great for who? Not me. Not anyone I know. Two of my close friends lost their jobs in the last few months. And tech layoffs out of control due to interest rates. Fuck off with this propaganda
There's still a full on America+China+EU sized market crash boiling under that "booming" surface. I don't know quite how they staved it off with just Credit Suisse and two other banks imploding so far. But it's not done, it's not finished, it hasn't even started.
No idea what backroom deals were done in the financial sector to stop it all for now, but it's still coming. Otherwise corporations wouldn't still be bleeding the plebs dry with cost of living and trying to offset their shitty investments on the CBMS as well as fighting tooth and nail to keep students indebted forever, so the party can keep on rolling.
It's an utter clusterfuck. We'll see what happens in the next few years.
I gotta admit dude, this just smells like made up conspiracies. That Credit Suisse and 2 regional US bank shock happened almost a year ago. If those were emblematic of systemic issues, the failures would have continued, but they were instead just the result of bad governance and decision-making at each individual institution. The world economy absorbed those failures and moved on a long time ago.
And do you really think businesses need this excuse to raise prices? What about good old fashioned greed? Regarding prices either way, they've gone down in almost every sector of the economy besides groceries. High grocery prices definitely hurt the most, though, and I hope Biden can help influence grocers to charge less
I don't think they need excuses, no. But there is a limit to how much you can realistically get out of a stone.
The world economy has absorbed fuck all, because a lot of, if not all, bad debt is still floating around the markets, hidden in swaps overnight repo, and similar mechanics. I don't care if you believe me, it's crazy talk for sure. It doesn't even matter a single bit if I am right, because there's fuck all to do about it for most day to day people. I'm also not being alarmist in: OH BUY GOLD NOW, PREP YOUR BUNKERS!!!!
I would much rather be wrong here. Would be fan-fucking-tastic, and if I am, good. That'd be literally the best for everyone.
All I'm saying is, the underlying issues that keep leading to these market upsets aren't resolved and CS, et al are just minor break outs of a major issue that keeps bubbling and boiling. Fucked if I knew when it'll blow, but the next time it does, will be bigger than anything we've seen. Just these three banks failing in 2022 was already much larger in value than the entirety of 2008-2009 collapses.
Again, it doesn't matter what I think or say. I don't know if I'm right either, how could I? No one does. I just believe that it's much more likely that the same fucks that caused 2008, who never saw any consequences whatsoever and are still running the show, never changed their greedy underhanded and horrible ways and 2008 was never resolved either, than all of them having a change of heart and never doing anything shifty or illegal ever again, cross their hearts and hope to die.