The Washington Post should know that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Continuing to tell voters they’re ignorant for not appreciating the Biden economy is case in point.
“The economy is improving under Biden. But many voters aren’t giving him credit,” read The Post’s condescending Jan. 14 headline. But that was just the start of The Post’s nonsense, which took six authors to spit out.
It proceeded to cite data points without context to prop up President Joe Biden’s cadaver of an economy: “By many measures, the U.S. economy is a great success story — recession fears have fallen, along with gas prices and the unemployment rate, while manufacturing construction is up along with nominal wages and the stock market.”
Except, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon just warned that the U.S. economy looks like the dreaded stagflation era of the 1970s; Reuters reported in December that U.S. manufacturing was “mired in weakness” and forecasted the economy as “heading for slowdown.”
In fact, the New York Federal Reserve’s Empire State business-conditions index "sank in January to the lowest level since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, perhaps a sign of trouble brewing for the U.S. economy," according to MarketWatch. In addition, American households are having to spend an extra $11,434 a year just to maintain the standard of living they had in January 2021. Housing is also suffering. CNN reported in November that this was “the least affordable housing market since 1984. It’s getting worse.”
With regards to the unemployment rate, Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni already noted that between five and eight million people are now missing from the labor force, “artificially reducing the unemployment rate.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, “One quarter of American[s’] retirements savings -- $30,000 -- are gone since Joe Biden took office. Enough to delay millions of Americans' retirement for a decade,” wrote Heritage Foundation economist Peter St. Onge in an X post. Credit card debt is also at a record $1.08 trillion, with a whopping 56 million Americans swimming in credit card debt for at least a year.
In addition, the New York Post just reported that the U.S. government had “overstated” job growth in 2023 by a whopping 439,000 jobs. This indicated that the gross overstatement meant the “job market is not as healthy as the government suggests.”
All of this somehow spells a “great success story," but those dumb plebeians just aren’t getting it, implied The Post in its propaganda. “Despite the statistics, the kitchen-table experience of Biden’s first term has meant that many voters have experienced the last few years as a time of relative economic hardship.” But don’t despair, proclaimed The Post. Biden is supposedly due for a Reaganesque comeback and the voters will soon come to their senses:
Biden’s polling on the economy has fallen with consumer confidence since he got into office, only recently stabilizing as confidence has begun to rebound. Wages are up, but the sting of higher grocery, coffee and restaurant bills remain. The president is still looking for credit from the budding manufacturing renaissance brought about by recent bipartisan legislation, though relatively few projects have been announced or begun production yet. White House advisers are optimistic that the American public will soon internalize the good news and give the president credit before November. His political advisers note that other presidents who won reelection, like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, overcame challenging first-term economic conditions, [emphasis added.]
What a joke. Journalist Roger Lowenstein pointed out in a Jan. 15 guest essay for The New York Times that “Inflation has snatched away the gains from even a very strong labor market.” Lowenstein’s analysis proceeded to showcase why propagandists at The Post are doing readers no favors by repeatedly gaslighting them over their economic struggles:
Over [Biden's] first two years, as price hikes outran wages, real median household income fell 2.7 percent. The census has yet to report median income for 2023, but given that real wages were up about 1 percent through November, the cumulative change in household median income, adjusted for inflation, over Mr. Biden’s first three years is likely to be in the range of mildly negative to very mildly positive. In other words, in the all-important category of improving living standards, the country did not make progress.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Washington Post at 202-334-6000 and demand it stop gaslighting Americans on their economic struggles.
