Tag Archives: Bidenomics

The Real Data vs. What We Have Been Told

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On Monday, The Washington Examiner posted the following headline:

If economic growth seems too good to be true, that’s because it is

I would revise that headline slightly to “If economic growth is so good, why do people seem to be struggling financially?”

The article reports:

Perhaps the most notorious example this year has been the jobs numbers published by the Biden administration. Consider the newly released August jobs report. While the economy added 187,000 jobs last month, previous months were revised down by 110,000 jobs. That means 59% of the employment growth last month was jobs we thought we already had.

In fact, every monthly employment report this year has been revised down, meaning the economy has been adding fewer jobs than initially believed. Worse, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published its semiannual benchmark revisions showing jobs were overestimated by more than 300,000.

Between the downward adjustments for the monthly data and the semiannual benchmark, the number of jobs has been revised down by almost 700,000. That’s 30% of the jobs initially estimated to have been added this year. Adding insult to injury, government jobs were revised upward with the semiannual benchmark.

To be clear, jobs data are normally revised, and occasionally, several months in a row will be revised in the same direction, sometimes heavily. But this year stands out because so many of the statistics have consistently turned out to be worse than initially estimated.

Other labor market indicators have followed this pattern. The number of job openings, a proxy for labor demand, has not only fallen over the last several months but previous levels were also revised down. The latest estimate shows job openings are now 2 million below the initial figure for the start of the year.

And the problem goes beyond the labor sector to the general economy. The revised estimate for gross domestic product in the second quarter of the year removed an eighth of the previously estimated growth, falling from 2.4% to 2.1%. Investment and business income, in particular, are in bad shape.

The media in America has brought us to the point where we have a choice either to believe what we see or what we are being told. We are told that Bidenomics is working and that we are all better off under President Biden. What we see tells a different story. It is our choice as to whether or not we believe our eyes or what we are being told.

Bidennomics At Work

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On September 12, The Washington Examiner reported the following:

Median household incomes peaked at $78,250 in 2019, the year before the pandemic. They declined in 2022 to $74,580, a year that saw inflation soar, undercutting household purchasing power.

“Despite nominal gains, historically high inflation resulted in a decline in real median household income,” said Liana Fox, assistant division chief for economic characteristics in the Census Bureau’s Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division.

That’s about a $300 a month decrease.

The article continues:

The figures released on Tuesday showed that poverty was flat, with about 11.5% of the population, or 38 million people, below the poverty line, which was $29,678 for a family of four.

The bureau also reported a jump in child poverty by one metric, the supplemental poverty measure, or SPM, from 5.2% to 12.4%. The increase was attributable in large part to the expiration of the temporary expanded child tax credit implemented by Democrats and President Joe Biden as a form of pandemic relief. The SPM, unlike the official poverty measure, includes tax credits in calculating household resources.

The question that needs to be asked in next year’s election is, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

The Results Of Out-Of-Control Spending

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On Wednesday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the budget deficit.

The article reports:

Over the weekend, the Washington Post let it slip that all is not well in Bidenomicsville. The deficit, it reports, could end up hitting $2 trillion when the current fiscal year ends in three weeks, which it describes as an “unexpected deficit surge.”

In other words, the deficit will nearly double this year, calling the lie on one of President Joe Biden’s favorite boasts about how he cut the deficit more than any president in history.

But while this apparently comes as a shock to the Post, as well as other liberal news sites that picked up on the Post report, anyone paying attention knew this was happening.

Back in February, for example, we pointed out that Biden’s reckless economic policies had added more than $5 trillion to projected deficits, even as he claimed he’d done more to cut the deficit than “any president in history.”

…Now, households are paying dearly in the form of sharply higher prices for food, energy consumer goods, rents, and just about anything else they buy.

At the same time, Biden pushed through tax hikes and unleashed federal regulators, who are now gleefully writing rules to ban gas stoves, force electric car sales, slap massive new costs on energy producers, with plenty more to come. These are all anti-growth policies that are having their expected effect.

This is what Bidenomics is all about. And now we have a budget crisis that is snowballing.

That’s because while revenues keep coming in “unexpectedly” low (thanks to Biden’s sluggish economy), interest rate hikes are fueling massive increases in the cost of financing the federal government’s $30 trillion debt load.

Shutting down the government to stop the spending may be the only way we even have a possibility of not seeing our economy collapse under the weight of the federal debt.

How Is Bidenomics Working For You?

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On Monday, Breitbart posted an article about the ‘success’ of Bidenomics. The White House is attempting to convince Americans that Bidenomics has had a positive impact on the American economy. I don’t think they are succeeding.

The article reports:

A super-majority of voters have negative views of the U.S. economy and disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the issue, according to a Wall Street Journal poll that the paper describes as “a stark warning to the 80-year-old incumbent ahead of the 2024 contest.”

Sixty-three percent of American registered voters say the economy’s strength is “not so good” or “poor.” Just 32 percent say the economy is “good” and only five percent say the economy is “excellent.”

…When asked how the economy has fared over the past two years, 58 percent say the economy has gotten worse. Just 28 percent say the economy has gotten better. Twelve percent say the economy is about the same as it was two years ago.

Although the rate of inflation has declined this year, Americans are unhappy with rising prices. Seventy-four percent say inflation has moved in the wrong direction, with just 20 percent saying it has moved in the right direction.

…The economy is weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans. Thirty-eight percent of Americans say the economy is the most important issue in the 2024 Presidential election, up from 35 percent in April. Another 10 percent said inflation is the most important issue, up from seven percent in April. After the economy, the top issue is “immigration, at 23 percent. No other issue scores in the double-digits.

These negative views of the economy are likely weighing down Biden’s overall popularity. Just 39 percent say they have a favorable view of Biden, versus 58 percent who say they have an unfavorable view. Forty-nine percent say they have a very unfavorable view.

Unfortunately, because of media bias, former President Trump has never been given credit for the economy he created during the first two years of his administration (and was beginning to rebuild after Covid). The logical solution to the pending economic disaster under President Biden is to re-elect President Trump. However, the media and the uni-party in Washington are willing to do anything to prevent that from happening.

Who Wins Under Bidenomics?

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On Saturday, The Washington Examiner posted an article about Bidenomics, the name given to the Biden administration’s economic programs.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden announced $12 billion in corporate welfare to U.S. automakers and their suppliers this week to subsidize a transition from gasoline-powered cars to electric cars.

This should be understood as part of the long-term effort to ban gasoline-powered cars while insisting that they are not banning gasoline-powered cars.

Check out this paragraph in this CNN article on the subsidies: “The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last year that aggressive, pollution-slashing changes in the global transportation sector — including the transition to EVs — could reduce the sector’s emissions by more than 80%.” The New York Times likewise writes in its article on this $12 billion in handouts: “Transportation is responsible for about one-third of the greenhouse gases generated by the United States, pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.”

But more interesting than the climate angle here is the redistribution angle. Biden administration officials present this corporate welfare as a way to help auto workers.

The article notes:

“Under Bidenomics, building a clean energy economy can and should provide a win‑win opportunity for auto companies and unionized workers who have anchored the American economy for decades.”

This is literally trickle-down economics. Biden gives billions to big business in the hope that big business will pass the money on to workers. The irony is that Biden always pretends to hate “trickle-down economics” and claims that Bidenomics is the alternative.

“Here’s the simple truth about trickle-down economics,” Biden said this summer: “It didn’t represent the best of American capitalism, let alone America.”

This is totally empty rhetoric, as Biden’s $12 billion corporate welfare to automakers shows.

Actually, Bidenomics is simply a plan to raid the American treasury, bankrupt the country and force everyone into a government-controlled crypto-currency. The only way to recover the American economy is to lower taxes on people and corporations, reduce regulation, and decrease government. The chances of that happening under a Democrat administration are non-existent.

How Is Bidenomics Working For You?

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On Thursday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the current state of the American economy.

The article reports:

Inflation rose in July after steadily declining from a high of 9.1% in June 2022, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) release on Thursday.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI), a broad measure of the prices of everyday goods like energy and food, increased 3.2% on an annual basis in July, compared to 3.0% in June, according to the BLS. Core CPI, which excludes the volatile categories of energy and food, remained high, rising 4.7% year-over-year in July, compared to 4.8% in June.

“Inflation has become much more ingrained in the economy than the White House, Congress, or the Fed want to admit,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Combined with slowing economic growth, we have the perfect recipe for stagflation.”

The workforce participation rate has remained at 62.6 since March. In February 2020, before Covid, it was 63.3. It began a downward spiral in March 2020 and has never fully recovered. The economy has not grown significantly–jobs added are simply the jobs coming back after the Covid pandemic.

The article concludes:

The U.S. added 187,000 jobs for the month of July, 13,000 fewer than economists expected, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.5%. The number of jobs for the months of June and May was revised down by a cumulative 49,000 jobs.

The U.S. economy grew at a rate of 2.4% in the second quarter of 2023, surprising economists who anticipated a more modest expansion of 2%.

About That “Bidenomics” Thing

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On Monday, The Independent Journal Review posted an article about rising gasoline prices.

The article reports:

Gas prices have quietly been on the rise over the summer as President Joe Biden and his administration have touted the merits of his “Bidenomics” agenda.

U.S. oil prices jumped by nearly 4% last week, and the per-gallon price at the pump hit a national average of $3.75 Monday, the highest recorded average since November 2022, according to AAA and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Continued increases may pose a new headache for Biden, who is promoting the “Bidenomics” agenda ahead of his 2024 run for reelection.

Global oil prices are up 16% since late June, and they have increased for each of the past five weeks, according to CNN. Prices may only continue to rise in August and September as Saudi Arabia, Russia and other OPEC+ members undertake production cuts equivalent to about 1.5% of global supply, announced in early July.

The price increase is partially due to the actions of OPEC (The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) which has cut its production, but that cut is also due to the fact that America is no longer respected enough to be able to negotiate to prevent that cut and that America is no longer energy independent. Had we maintained our energy independence, the cut would not have had much impact.

Some of us remember the gas lines of the 1970’s. Energy independence will prevent those gas lines from happening again. It is unfortunate the the Biden administration did not understand the need to continue America’s freedom from the whims of OPEC.

 

The Individual States As Laboratories

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When our Founding Fathers put together the Constitution, they envisioned that the states would act as policy laboratories–that when one state enacted a policy that worked, the other states would copy that policy. That is a great idea, but unfortunately egos, lust for power, and other things interfere with that basic idea.

On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article illustrating the differences in the outcomes of some of the economic policies various states have chosen.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden last week bragged that his economic policies — straight from the Democrats blueprint that says “borrow, tax, spend, regulate, then do it all again” — are working. But as we’ve noted, Bidenomics has been a wreck, a flop that is taking us into a recession.

Not only did Biden openly boast as our sclerosis grows worse, he also, as Democrats always do, took a jab at “trickle-down economics,” claiming it has “failed the middle class … failed America … blew up the deficit” and “increased inequity.”

…We don’t see Biden or any other Democrat ever coming around to supply-side economic policies, the correct terminology for what they sneeringly call “trickle-down economics,” which asserts that lower taxes and less regulatory meddling fuel economic growth. Yet they are exactly what our economy — any economy – needs, now and forever.

In our post-lockdown world, the states that have the strongest economic recoveries are the red ones on the map. And what do they have in common? Low taxes and light regulation.

We can see this vividly in the rankings of states that have had the greatest increases in hiring over the last year. Of the top 10, only two are blue, or Democratic, states.

(The Washington Post marks Georgia, fourth on the list, as one of three blue states because Biden took its 16 electoral votes, but that is misleading [intentionally, we’re sure] because it is a red state with large Republican majorities in both chambers of the legislature and a popular [53% of the vote in 2022] GOP governor. Nevada, next at fifth, is also considered blue even though it too has a GOP governor.)

The next seven states, according to the Post, are also red or Trump states and they tend to “​​have unusually low tax rates and lean on extractive industries such as mining or petroleum. We’ve seen firsthand the economic boom that gas and pipelines can bring to struggling regions.”

The article also notes:

“Heavily taxed blue states such as New York and California,” the Free Beacon continues, “last year had some of the country’s most drastic drops in tax revenue. At the same time, Republican states are enjoying the highest revenue increases even as they keep income taxes low.”

All I ask is that when people who have the sense to get out of blue states and move to red states move is that they don’t bring their blue state policies with them!

When Fact Checkers Check President Biden

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Recently President Biden made a speech where he claimed that Bidenomics was working for everyone–inflation was down, jobs were up, etc. Well, that sounds wonderful, but the numbers tell a different story.

Issues & Insights reported:

The middle class made huge gains during the “trickle-down” Reagan boom and was making huge gains during the Trump boom until the Biden-backed COVID lockdowns gutted it.

Truth is, the only way Biden can make the case for “Bidenomics” is by lying. Examples:

    • “U.S. has had the highest economic growth rate, leading the world economies since the pandemic.”

Except it didn’t. The U.S. ranks 146th in real GDP growth in the world so far this year, came in 151st place last year, and was 66th in 2021, according to the International Monetary Fund.

    • “We created 13.4 million new jobs.”

Also false. Because almost 10 million of those were simply refilled jobs lost during the pointless COVID lockdown. Under Biden, the number of net new jobs is less than 4 million — which is nothing to brag about, given that the working-age population has grown by 6.8 million since Biden took office.

    • “Americans are back to work who’ve been on the sidelines, and they want to come back.”

Another falsehood. There are almost 10 million people who’ve dropped out of the labor force as of today, which is 2.7 million higher than it was just before all the COVID lockdowns.

    • “Just in my first two years in office, my team and I have reduced the deficit by $1.7 trillion.“

His biggest lie yet. As we pointed out in this space earlier, a Congressional Budget Office report released at the start of this year showed that “Biden sharply increased the deficit last year, this year, and next year, and he has set the country on course to add a total of $5.45 trillion to the federal deficit over the following decade.”

The only thing that Biden said that was truthful in his speech is that “Bidenomics is working.”

It’s working all right, assuming that Biden’s plan was to destroy America.

Please follow the link to the article. It includes a number of charts that actually illustrate what has happened to the American economy since 2021.