The only useful thing to deduce from polls more than a year away from the next presidential election is this from Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin:
“We have a deficit of accurate, reliable information in the electorate.”
She’s right.
A ghastly chunk of today’s voters simply don’t know what they’re talking about.
“They tell pollsters we are in a recession,” she writes. “They tell us Biden was involved in his son’s business ventures. These beliefs are unsupported by evidence.”
The purpose here is not to address the latter claim (and its attached “impeachment inquiry” — oh, brother), an act as unconscionable as Lauren Boebert in “Night at the Theater.”
The purpose here is to share facts about the economy, which hopefully can be shared with voters swayed by facts.
The rest of those voters can stand at the corner and make conspiracy claims about the nearest fire hydrant.
As for the economy: Of course, prices are high – in large part due to a pandemic and Putin’s war on civilization. But voters should know that inflation is moderating.
The US inflation rate – 3.67% as of this writing, actually is a stunning drop from the 8.26 of a year ago. In Europe it’s 6.10%. Gripe if you will about prices, but the facts about inflation are on Joe Biden’s side.
Were it not for the war-making of Donald Trump’s favorite tyrant (I know, so many from which to choose), gas prices would be much lower as well.
Again, gnash your teeth at the pump, but know that that big-butted truck of yours is a key contributor to the price of petrol.
Now let’s talk jobs. The nation’s unemployment rate – 3.6% — is the lowest in half a century. That’s right.
Any guess what it was when Biden took office? Like inflation, it was nearly twice as acute: 6.3%.
Call him doddering. Call him boring. Call him corrupt in spite of a lack of any evidence — while the leader of the opposition party fights off 91 actual felony charges. But don’t call Biden a disaster in his handling of the economy.
“Bidenomics is working – big time,” writes the New York Times’ David Brooks, who’s not even close to being a raving liberal.
Why all the good news about employment? How about the fact that, as Brooks highlights, since 2021 investment in manufacturing has more than doubled?
A key factor is the Inflation Reduction Act, which has turned the US into a churning, cleaner-burning incubator of sustainable energy technology.
Long after Biden is gone, this development will fuel innovation and investment in semiconductors, cleaner means of transportation and alternative energy.
It’s the biggest thing any world leader has ever done for a climate-imperiled planet, and it didn’t come at the cost of US industry. It came as a boost.
Much of the wage growth has taken place in hard-hit regions that relied on old, dirty products and technologies, with major centers of the boom in the Upper Midwest and parts of the Southeast.
Here’s another interesting fact, for those who care about such things.
The Federal Reserve Board has pointed to robust wage growth due to manufacturing jobs and the fact that growth has accelerated particularly for non-college graduates – the disillusioned voting bloc that said Donald Trump was the answer.
We see auto workers strike, and why? Because the going has been so good for the industry that they are incensed to see CEOs making a killing without sharing the profits.
The bosses aren’t spreading the blessings around sufficiently in the “performance-based” approach to compensation by which General Motors CEO Mary Barra says she deserved the $23.7 million she got in 2020.
So much inequality still afflicts this society. No one interested in economic justice can be satisfied. But don’t go saying the economy is a wreck under Biden.
That is another big lie to attribute to a disgraced, twice-impeached, RICO-indicted ex-president.
Check the perspiration on the brows of those auto executives, and know that the economy may be going too well.
John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2023
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