You Know You Are Toxic When…

On Wednesday, Just the News reported that Ohio Senate Democratic nominee Representative Tim Ryan will not be appearing with President Biden next Wednesday when the President visits Ohio to discuss a program benefiting union workers. That is an indication of how low the President is in the polls.

The article reports:

Ryan’s campaign says the candidate will be a no-show due to an unavoidable scheduling conflict – the same explanation given by Democratic gubernatorial nominee Nan Whaley’s campaign.

The absences from candidates in tough elections at the Biden event suggests some hesitancy to appear on stage with a president whose has low poll numbers – amid record inflation.

In addition, Biden in 2020 lost to incumbent GOP President Trump roughly 53-to-45% in Ohio, a traditional labor union state.

Biden will, however, on Wednesday be joined by Ohio lawmakers and fellow Democrats Sen. Sherrod Brown, Reps. Shantel Brown and Marcy Kaptur and Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, as well as Labor Secretary Marty Walsh.

The address will primarily be aimed at appealing to blue collar voters.

The article concludes:

On Wednesday, Ohio GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance tried to tie Ryan to Biden and his policies.

“Ryan has worked in lockstep with Biden to destroy our economy and Ohio’s middle class is suffering today because of it,” he said “But now, for the second time in two months, Ryan is refusing to be seen in public with his own party’s president.”

If the blue collar workers cannot see the difference in the impact of President Biden’s policies and the impact of President Trump’s policies, they are not paying attention. Under President Biden, the middle-class is struggling with high gasoline prices, high food prices, high energy prices, and no end in sight. Under President Trump, the middle class prospered.

On January 28, 2022, The Wall Street Journal posted the following:

Part of what made the Trump boom unique, however, is who benefited the most. The economy grew in ways that mostly benefited low-income and middle-class households, categories that cover a disproportionate number of blacks. In 2016 the percentage of blacks who hadn’t completed high school was nearly double that of whites—15% vs. 8%—and the percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree was 35% for whites and only 21% for blacks.

These education gaps are reflected in work patterns. Blacks are overrepresented in the retail, healthcare and transportation industries, which provide tens of millions of working- and middle-class jobs. In 2019, 54% of black households earned less than $50,000 a year, versus 33% of white households. At the other end of the income distribution, slightly more than half of all white households (50.7%) earned at least $75,000, compared with less than a third (29.4%) of black households. What this means is that reductions in income inequality can translate into reductions in racial inequality, which is what the country experienced in the pre-pandemic Trump economy.

Between 2017 and 2019, median household incomes grew by 15.4% among blacks and only 11.5% among whites. The investment bank Goldman Sachs released a paper in March 2019 that showed pay for those at the lower end of the wage distribution rising at nearly double the rate of pay for those at the upper end. Average hourly earnings were growing at rates that hadn’t been seen in almost a decade, but what “has set this rise apart is that it’s the first time during the economic recovery that began in mid-2009 that the bottom half of earners are benefiting more than the top half—in fact, about twice as much,” CNBC reported.

Citing a graph included in Goldman’s analysis, CNBC added that the “trend began in 2018”—the first year that the corporate tax cuts were in effect—“and has continued into this year and could be signaling a stronger economy than many experts think.”

Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s policies have erased all of those gains in eighteen months. Electing a Republican Congress may help put back some policies that will be beneficial to the middle class, but we won’t see any upward mobility to and within the middle class until we vote Democrats and liberal Republicans out of office.