Biden’s Big-Government Socialism Has Turned Boom to Bust
No wonder the President is sinking in the polls.
Oops — President Biden did it again. Another major untruth regarding the economy in his Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month.
As E.J. Antoni fact-checked in the Committee to Unleash Prosperity Hotline: Mr. Biden’s claim that “real income for the bottom half of earners is up by 3.4 percent since I took office.”
I know that Presidents don’t lie, so I’ll just call this an incorrect assertion. A massive leap into heavy cognitive dissonance. Or, how about, a new Bottomless Pinocchio.
The facts are: under Mr. Biden, the bottom 25 percent of income earners have seen their real incomes fall by 2.3 percent, while the second income quartile has fallen 3.9 percent.
These are data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And, indeed, over the course of the Biden presidency, average weekly earnings adjusted for inflation have fallen 2.1 percent overall for the entire workforce.
This measure of collapsing incomes has declined 26 consecutive months. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
This is why Mr. Biden’s economic policy approval has fallen as much as take-home pay has dropped. In the latest Democracy Institute poll, Joe Biden’s economic approval rating crashed to 26 percent.
Other polls corroborate his decline, and I want to point out that a number of presidential prediction models, especially the Professor Ray Fair model at Yale, relies heavily on after-inflation measures of employees’ pay.
Another key measure which has similarly dropped under Mr. Biden is real disposable income, that measures employee pay after inflation and after taxes.
Also, Mr. Biden brags continuously that he has curbed inflation. True enough, inflation has come down to around 5 percent from a peak of nearly 10 percent. However, 5 percent is a very big inflation number. It’s more than twice the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.
And during the entire Biden presidency, CPI has increased 15.6 percent, with energy prices rising 31.2 percent and grocery prices rising 19.7 percent.
Meanwhile, the economy has sagged, badly. In Mr. Biden’s first full year, that is 2022, the economy increased by less than 1 percent. Over the last 5 quarters, or 15 months, the economy has grown by barely 1 percent. The second quarter ending in June will probably come in about the same.
Remember Mr. Biden inherited a 6.5 percent growth rate with roughly 1.5 percent inflation from his predecessor, President Trump.
Essentially, Mr. Biden’s big government socialism has turned a booming economy into a bust.
Voters know this. So do the roughly 160 million people in the civilian workforce. All of Mr. Biden’s untruths notwithstanding, his re-election prospects are dismal.
That is one reason why he has apparently ordered his Justice Department to throw Mr. Trump into jail, so the former president will be prevented from running against Mr. Biden.
Just like Mr. Biden’s phony income numbers, his corrupt Justice Department is fooling nobody.
From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.