Despite Biden’s weird economic boasts, his policies have made things worse
Quin Hillyer
Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu on Sunday gave a concise prebuttal to what we know will be one of President Joe Biden’s main themes in Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
Namely, it is laughable for Biden to claim economic successes he had very little to do with. On several of the Sunday morning news shows, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claimed (in various iterations) that Biden’s administration achieved “the biggest job gains in history,” while at the same time “bringing down inflation.”
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This echoes all the administration talking points for the past several weeks. But Sununu was having none of it.
“We’re going to hear him take credit for, you know, adding more jobs than ever before,” the governor said. “After a pandemic, that wasn’t — that wasn’t very hard. He’s going to kind of talk about, oh, we have unemployment finally coming down and inflation coming down. Well, it was, inflation was, at a record high. Of course, it’s coming down. It couldn’t have gotten any higher.”
Bingo. When Biden took office, the country already had added back about 11 million of the 22 million jobs it lost because of all the government-ordered business shutdowns in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Now Buttigieg boasts that the economy had added “12 million jobs” since Biden took office. Do the math, and it means that it took almost another two years just to catch up from artificially caused job losses related to the worst pandemic in modern medical history. It was only three months ago that the job economy reached its pre-pandemic levels.
Of course, that’s what happens when wars or disasters, rather than underlying economic policies, cause massive job losses: When the wars or disasters end, so do job losses. It’s exactly what happened after the worldwide “Spanish flu” pandemic in 1919-21: The unemployment rate dropped from 11.7% in 1921 to 2.4% in 1923 under one key estimate, and from 8.7% to 4.8% even according to the numbers from Christina Romer, who headed the Council of Economic advisors in the first Obama-Biden administration.
In other words, even according to liberal economists, Biden has done no better than the benchmark job gains from similar circumstances 100 years ago. In sum, those job gains would have happened regardless.
Monthly price inflation, on the other hand, has edged downward only for three months, after a hugely damaging spike that another longtime Democratic economist, Larry Summers, directly blamed on Biden’s own big-spending policies. When 18 months of the worst inflation in 40 years are followed by just three decent months, still leaving the annual rate at a wage-erasing 6.5%, that’s not something to brag about.
The way most ordinary people measure the economy is by comparing how their wages compare to prices. Well, since Biden took office, prices are up far more than wages, and in the past year the 6.5% inflation rate far exceeds the 5.2% wage growth.
By comparison, even as the post-Spanish-flu economy roared back to life in 1923, the inflation rate then was only 1.7%.
As Sununu said on “This Week” on ABC, “Go into a store, go into a grocery store and just talk to people in the cereal aisle. What are they feeling?”
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Obviously, a lot of other conditions — far different labor laws and Europe’s attempts to rebuild after World War I among them — make comparisons somewhat inexact, but the basic principle is clear: Job growth and wage growth is almost automatic after artificial economic shocks, while horrific inflation need not occur.
By any reasonable assessment of all economic factors combined, the U.S. economy is still worse off, not better, because of Biden’s policies. No amount of public-relations “spin” can spin that dross into gold.