AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
Ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union Address Tuesday night, the White House released a fact sheet declaring that “the Biden economic plan is working” and “the state of the economy is strong” – claims that were quickly echoed by the mainstream media to lay the groundwork for Biden’s speech. But this narrative defies the reality that millions of families are experiencing and further underscores just how oblivious Democrats are to the financial suffering their policies have inflicted on the American people.
Public polling data highlights a glaring disconnect between Democrat rhetoric and Americans’ actual feelings about the state of the economy. According to a CBS News poll released this week, 61% of Americans rate the economy as “bad” under Biden. 38% expect the economy to be “in a recession” at some point in the next year, while 24% expect it to be “slowing” and just 20% say “booming/growing.” Many Wall Street investors are similarly forecasting a recession in 2023. Small business optimism remains low, as does consumer confidence.
Democrats have largely pointed to low unemployment and strong job creation numbers to justify their dubious claims of economic revival. And indeed, on its own that data seems to suggest the economy is thriving. At 3.4%, unemployment is the lowest it has been in 50 years. The January jobs report, released last Friday, showed that the economy added more than double the number of expected jobs last month, continuing a trend of strong jobs reports from the second half of 2022.
But Biden and his allies have been intentionally misleading about what these few apparently positive topline numbers represent, even as they downplay or outright ignore the plentiful evidence painting a far less rosy picture of the country’s economic condition.
While the administration smugly trumpets the total number of jobs created throughout the first two years of Biden’s presidency, they conveniently fail to mention that Biden took office in the midst of an ongoing economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic that began under President Trump. As data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows, Biden inherited a strong “V-shaped” jobs recovery from Trump, which then leveled off sharply once Biden’s economic policies took effect.
As economist E.J. Antoni pointed out in an op-ed for Fox News in December, technicalities in how BLS measures the number of employed people and jobs filled also allow for double counting, artificially inflating the number of jobs created. For example, someone who is forced to take a second or third part-time job to put food on the table would be counted as two or three “jobs created.”
Even the low unemployment figure is not what it at first seems. Thanks to a slew of Democrat policies incentivizing people not to return to work, labor force participation remains weak, and has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. In other words, while unemployment is low, so is the total number of people employed, which in turn, according to Antoni, “artificially depresses the unemployment rate so that even though the number of people employed declined in the household survey, the unemployment rate remained unchanged.”
Given this context, a more accurate interpretation of the entirety of the jobs report and unemployment data – not just the headline numbers – is that Biden slowed rather than accelerated the recovery that began under Trump, and has in fact driven the country into a state of economic malaise.
Biden has also downplayed or ignored the disastrous effects of inflation, which skyrocketed to over 9% last year and continues to sit above 6%. The president notably dismissed inflation as a “global problem” during his State of the Union, making very little mention of an issue that has consistently ranked as a top concern for voters for well over a year. During a press conference touting the January jobs numbers last Friday, Biden angrily lashed out at a reporter for even asking about inflation, saying “Do I take any blame for inflation? No. Because it was already there when I got here, man.”
Official data shows, however, that Biden’s claim is false. As Reuters reported following the exchange, “inflation statistics did not spike until [Biden’s] presidency had already begun… the consumer price index rose 6.5% in 2022, compared to an annual rate around 1.4% when Biden took office.”
Higher inflation combined with relatively slow wage growth has also meant that real wages, or wages adjusted for inflation, have seen a continual slide for more than a year. In total, real average weekly earnings decreased more than 3% from December 2021 to December 2022 – a significant blow to working families already struggling to make ends meet.
Furthermore, even if some economic measures aren’t “as bad” right now as they were six months or a year ago, Biden still can’t erase or reverse the permanent harm his policies have had on Americans’ finances.
For instance, though Biden has touted the recent decline in gas prices, prices still remain nearly a dollar higher per gallon than when he took office, and are expected to remain the same or increase in the months ahead. Consumers will also never get back the hundreds or thousands of dollars more that they were forced to fork over when Biden’s policies sent gas soaring above $5 per gallon.
The economy also entered a recession last year, and many economists believe the country is headed for an even deeper recession in the months ahead or may already be in one now. As if that weren’t enough, a bear market in 2022 wiped out the modest gains the stock market saw in 2021, jeopardizing retirement plans for many older Americans and threatening the financial future of millions more.
This damage cannot be undone. Yet despite a clear record of failure, the administration bizarrely seems to expect praise and gratitude. Over the next few weeks, Biden and his cabinet are expected to launch a post-State of the Union “blitz” to promote their supposed economic successes and call for more big-spending policies that Biden outlined in his speech Tuesday night.
But unless that rhetoric is accompanied by news of substantive policy changes, few people will be willing to buy it.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @Shane_Harris_.
