Styx on the abject failure of Bidenomics

The numbers don't mean what you think they mean, and regular people are suffering from the obtuse mismanagement:

There's a lot that's quotable in this video.

Bidenomics has self-evidently failed. The American people appear to understand this. Most reliable economists understand this. Some news sites, though, are having a little bit of difficulty comprehending that fact.

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Yes, unemployment is low—which is good—you had a steady drop for a protracted period, which is good. The problem is, at this point, the additional job growth is second jobs; it's not primary jobs. The unemployment rate remains low in part because labor-force participation is low, so neither of those metrics are as meaningful as when they trot them out. Inflation remains high. Yes, the increase year over year has fallen, but it's still increasing, which is bad because wages aren't keeping up on a regular basis.

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Who does she [Karine Jean-Pierre] blame? Donald Trump. "We inherited an economy that was in a tailspin!" Fact check: fully false. Pants-on-fire moment. The US economy did take a hit in Trump's final year, but it was already sharply recovering by the time he left office. We have the statistics that are there.

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Unemployment soared because people weren't allowed to go to work. (sarcastically) It was so confusing how that happened! I would point out, of course, [that] that was not Trump's doing; that was various governors. Most of those jobs had already come back before Joe Biden took office. And for the better part of a year, he [Biden] struggled to get back just the jobs that had been lost due to the recklessness of the US government. Trump shares a role in that, but it's not even a primary or possibly secondary role. Because, of course, at the time, a state of emergency being declared, the governors effectively began taking action.

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Trump reigned over a nice, stable economy for years. The economy was having problems before Trump got into office, and he largely solved the problem. Again, I loved it when Obama said, "Well, Donald Trump doesn't have a magic wand he can wave to hit 4% unemployment" because he [Obama] was talking about how 7 [percent] was the new normal. We got down below 4, and it's funny because actually unemployment [is] now lower under Joe Biden than it was under Obama. So I guess Joe Biden, the one thing he did inherit was the magic wand from Trump!

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What's the Biden administration supposed to do? They keep printing more and more funny money to pay for more and more bureaucracy.

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Bidenomics is an unmitigated failure. And again, the good thing is that people actually understand that. That's because of the kind of bad economy that you have. Specifically with the inflation and high gas prices and so forth.

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The reason the American people are aware of the bad economy, though, is the acuteness of the fact that they go grocery shopping, and they pump gas. ...if every single week, or every single day, you're getting sticker shock of one form or another, yeah, that really drives the message home. And people also, they understand their wages. When they get their money, they understand whether the wages are keeping up with that inflation. For the vast majority of people, the answer is no.

RELATED: Who You Gonna Believe: Your Wallet or Your Lying Eyes? Subtitle: "Biden thinks he can strongarm us into believing in Bidenomics." Excerpt (slightly edited):

Joe Biden and his surrogates keep trying to convince and shame the American people into believing that the economy is doing great and that “Bidenomics” is the reason. Nice try. The people are unhappy and not buying it. While this is an emotional reaction, it also has a basis in real facts about the state of the economy, which are refracted through individuals’ personal circumstances.

The first and most glaring issue is that everything is more expensive than it was a few years ago. On top of this, wages have not kept up, real wealth and income have declined, and middle-class people find themselves harried by competing and rising costs in healthcare, electricity, food, housing, tuition, and cars. People who thought of themselves as middle class sometimes find themselves descending into proletariat status. In the more extreme cases, people become homeless late in life, having lost all their resources to deal with job loss or other emergencies.

Biden and his surrogates are correct that unemployment remains low, and that the economy is still moving along. The 2007-2009 period of the Great Recession was far worse and far more frightening in this regard, at least for those of us working in the private sector. Lots of hard-working and productive people found themselves out of work because of massive disruptions to capital markets and the banking sector.

We have a different problem today, which is inflation. But inflation is also different because it affects nearly everyone. During the Great Recession, large numbers of people never experienced significant pain as unemployment only affected a minority of workers. While 10% unemployment is a huge number of people looking for work, it also means 90% of the other people who wanted jobs were finding and keeping them.

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Even now, in spite of Biden and his surrogates bragging about lowering inflation, prices are not lower but are mostly still rising, though at a slower rate. For those whose wage gains have lagged the rise in prices, it means that everything is more expensive. Since pay increases are neither automatic, nor fully compensatory for price gains, persistent inflation functions as a pay cut.

This is not just random, nor can it all be blamed on the profligate spending of the Covid crisis. Biden’s policies deserve a lot of the blame. As I noted in a piece earlier this year, “Biden . . . took an economy already in recovery, which had a lot of extra cash sloshing around from the PPP and other Covid-related stimulus programs, and supercharged it with additional stimulus, which he ridiculously called the Inflation Reduction Act. Now we have 1970s style inflation.”

Do read the rest, and note how much of it dovetails with what Styx says. You can conclude either that Styx and Christopher Roach (the author of the above-quoted piece) are reading drone-like from the same sheet music, or that reality is reality, and it's seen the same way by different people who are in tune with reality.