As America heads into the final days of the lame duck administration under President Joe Biden, there are still clueless members of the media trying to sell the clownish concept of Bidenomics to the public as if the 2024 elections were still in full swing.
The Washington Post leadership, unsurprisingly, is no exception.
Post editorial board member Eduardo Porter is spinning his wheels trying to determine why Bidenomics wasn’t a winning message in a Dec. 26 op-ed. After all, wrote Porter in his, er, infinite wisdom: “So many things about the strategy made so much sense.”
In Porter’s distorted worldview, Biden’s inflation-stimulating $1.9 trillion stimulus package “looked like exactly the right bet.” The $739 billion climate change-obsessed and erroneously-named Inflation Reduction Act, along with other spendthrift legislation, appeared “equally adroit — a strategy to address the plight of the many White workers without a college degree who turned out for Donald Trump” in 2016.
The propaganda is strong with this one.
Porter, of course, regurgitated a few uncontextualized talking points from the White House to celebrate the alleged “stellar growth” and low unemployment Biden supposedly achieved. But alas, mourned Porter, “it all came to naught.” How anyone could write this drivel in the face of the inflationary, cost-of-living disaster wrought by Biden’s policies with a straight face is an achievement in itself.
Instead, Porter was content to miss the forest for the trees to reconcile the discrepancies between Bidenomics and the 2024 election results. “One reading of the pattern might suggest simply that prices are way more important than jobs for American voters.” But this is a false dichotomy. As Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni pointed out in August, 2024: “The labor market is nowhere near as strong as is being portrayed.” In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a Dec. 13 report exposing the devil in the details:
Even if every unemployed worker were to fill an open job within their respective industry, there would still be millions of unfilled job positions, highlighting the widespread labor shortage.
But Porter tried to make it seem like Americans were just simply too angry about prices being 20 percent higher than in 2021 to see how star-spangled awesome the Biden jobs market supposedly was:
However robust the job market has been, with an unemployment rate of just over 4 percent in November, it has been no consolation to voters angry over annual inflation that peaked at 9 percent in mid-2022, before settling back down to 2.7 percent, [emphasis added.]
Porter then threw out a bevy of other theories like spaghetti to the wall to explain voters’ discontent with the Biden economy, all of which treated Americans like they were just too blinded by dumb rage to see reason.
“Perhaps voters were so angry about the 'chaos at the border' that no amount of economic good news would have changed their minds. Perhaps it was Trump’s ‘they/them’ ad,” Porter quipped. But no theory was more insulting than Porter’s asinine insinuation that the reason why voters broke for Trump could be simply because the Biden economy was strong. In turn, claimed Porter, voters may have just felt comfortable shifting to a GOP administration:
Economists have proposed that strong economies simply favor Republicans, because voters feel flush and are more likely to prefer low taxes. When the economy is struggling, however, they rediscover their appreciation for social insurance and flock to Democrats instead.
Of course, nowhere did Porter mention that more than half of Americans are now struggling under Biden to pay their bills and save money, as Bloomberg News reported Nov. 19. Also missing from Porter’s pathetic excuse for analysis was that real wage growth hadn’t been enough to keep up with the months where prices were “disproportionately rising faster than Americans’ paychecks,” as Bankrate noted in a September 2024 study.
In fact, economist Dan Mitchell recently used Labor Department data to argue that “workers lost a lot of ground in 2021 and 2022. There’s been a bit of progress since then, but the best-case scenario is that workers have merely recovered their losses.”
As for the supposed “stellar growth” Porter bleated about, it is greatly undercut by the fact that it was being buoyed by an explosion of government debt. As Economist Daniel Lacalle wrote Nov. 17, an “unsustainable increase in government spending and federal debt bloated the official GDP, making gross domestic income significantly weaker than headline GDP.” Heritage Distinguished Visiting Fellow Andy Puzder likened the state of the Biden economy Dec. 20 to a “house of cards.” In short, Puzder argued, “thanks in large part to Biden’s four-year deficit spending spree, the economy is shackled by an incomprehensibly huge $36 trillion in debt and $1 trillion less in Treasury cash on hand.”
But Porter, sweeping all of this context under the rug, finally settled on the off-mark theory that Biden’s working class strategy was simply outdated by a few decades and “poorly targeted.” Porter concluded:
So perhaps the lesson for some future Democratic administration hoping to assist the working class is not necessarily that populist policies don’t work. It is that these policies need to be aimed at what America has become, not what it was a bunch of decades ago.
Yeah, keep telling yourself that Porter. Good grief.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Washington Post at 202-334-6000 and demand it stop gaslighting Americans on their economic struggles.
