Hey, you there eating ramen out of the paper cup, have you heard the economy is doing great?
Yes, your lying eyes deceive you every time you go to the supermarket. While you see a sharp spike in food prices, President Biden sees an economy that’s going gangbusters.
A month ago Biden released a statement praising the “strong” economy and its “steady and stable growth.”
“The economy has grown more since I took office than at this point in any presidential term in the last 25 years — including 3% growth over the last year — while unemployment has stayed below 4% for more than two years,” he insisted.
Unemployment is low, sure — but people are working more than ever to afford the things they need.
Biden supporters have taken to calling it the “vibecession”: There is no recession, it’s just the vibes are off.
A Thursday article in The New York Times blamed everything except the policies coming out of the White House for the American people’s dissatisfaction.
“Call it the vibecession. Call it a mystery. Blame TikTok, media headlines or the long shadow of the pandemic,” the Times’ Jeanna Smialek fretted. “The gloom prevails.”
The mysterious gloom prevails specifically because things are gloomy — and blaming TikTok doesn’t change that.
People know things cost much more than they did four years ago. We might not be experiencing an official recession, which economists define as a decrease in gross domestic product for two successive quarters, but that’s not the only reason why families feel a financial pinch.
Vibes matter, but the actual numbers are bad, too.
Inflation remains painfully high. On X, Heather Long of The Washington Post pointed to a graph showing cumulative inflation under each president.
“Why are Americans still upset about inflation?” Long asked. “A: The cumulative price change under Biden is the highest since Jimmy Carter. What we’ve just experienced is rare in recent history.”
But Biden’s defenders couldn’t let that data stand! Chris Hayes of MSNBC retorted, “The difference between ‘Morning in America!’ and ‘Everything Sucks!’ is, apparently, the last .8% of cumulative price change.”
Well, not quite.
Ronald Reagan’s cumulative inflation rate was about half that of his predecessor Jimmy Carter. Meanwhile, Biden’s number is something like four times Donald Trump’s.
Also, if we’re talking vibes, the trajectory of the national mood was noticeably brightening during Reagan’s first four years. Things had improved so much that his 1984 re-election campaign pitch specifically pointed out that inflation and interest rates had gone down in his first term.
Joe Biden can’t run on that.
Instead, Biden’s friends in the media massage the data to claim that everything is rosy when it clearly isn’t.
In October, Democratic cheerleader and economist Paul Krugman posted a graph of decreasing inflation and noted, “The war on inflation is over. We won, at very little cost.”
But the graph’s statistics excluded food, energy, shelter and used cars.
In other words, the things you want to buy still cost astronomical amounts, but prices on the things you don’t want to buy aren’t increasing quite as fast. We win!
The current average interest rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage is 7.17%. When Biden took office it was 2.7%.
People lucky enough to have bought homes in 2020 or earlier are stuck in them — and so many others are forgoing the homeowner dream.
The joke used to be that Millennials were eating too much avocado toast to be able to afford a home. Now the avocado toast is out of reach, too.
The lack of movement among homeowners jacks up rent prices as well. It isn’t vibes when half of Americans pay more than 30% of their salaries in rent.
In addition to pretending everything is just peachy, Joe Biden is sending cash to his wealthy supporters.
A Wharton analysis of his student-loan-payoff boondoggle found it would assist about 750,000 households making over $312,000 in household income.
Biden didn’t choose to ease the pain of an elderly couple struggling with their electric bill or a single mom figuring out how to pay for health-care costs; he gave an absurd amount of money to some of the richest people in the country.
Meanwhile, a mom wanting to treat her kids to McDonald’s after a Little League game has to think twice.
Prices at some McDonald’s restaurants have increased by over 100% in the last decade. A product that used to be aimed at lower-income people is now only affordable to those getting Biden Bucks for their student loans.
Are you better off today or four years ago? The Biden administration pretending not to understand the question doesn’t change the answer.