Biden’s economy continues to punish already hurting families

May 16, 2023

President Joe Biden’s economy continues to punish Americans, even those who supported him. That punishment comes in the form of high prices on most everything, employers who can’t find enough workers, and a declining standard of living, among other things.

Biden celebrates the recent rise in wages, which is a good thing in a growing economy, which creates an atmosphere where employers are competing for workers to keep up with increasing demand. Today, there are millions more open jobs than there are people looking for a job. 

But this economy is not growing, and wages are increasing now because employers can’t fill their open jobs and have to raise wages to get workers, so they can keep the doors open. This increases costs and results in higher prices. This is not normal, and is a sign of an unhealthy economy. 

What has caused this? During the pandemic, millions of people lost their jobs, and two years after it ended the labor force is still down by 2.8 million workers. Where are these people, and why aren’t they working?

According to Casey Mulligan, an economist at the University of Chicago, in a study titled “Paying Americans Not to Work,” 24 states have unemployment benefits and Obamacare subsidies for an unemployed family of four that are equal to or above the national median household income.

This family of four in three of those states gets $100,000 a year. In 14 other states, the family gets $80,000 or more. That is pretty decent pay for just staying home, so why work? Another question: Why are these benefits still being paid when the pandemic is over and millions of jobs are unfilled?

Another aspect of this situation is that Biden is able to brag about a low unemployment rate because those nearly 3 million people who lost jobs are not counted in the labor force, since they are not working or looking for a job. But when you count those who are being paid not to work as part of the labor force, the unemployment rate is horrible,

By contrast, before the pandemic hit, median family income in 2019 rose to almost $73,000, a $4,600 increase over 2018. Median family income levels rose for every racial group: White Americans, 5.7 percent; Black Americans, 7.9 percent; Hispanic Americans, 7.1 percent, and Asian Americans, 10.6 percent. This resulted in a lowered poverty rate of 10.5 percent, a 60-year low. 

While wages today are growing, the good aspects of higher pay are offset by the increases in the price of goods and services. The effect on workers is actually not more money in their pockets, but effectively less than they had before.

How can we reverse things and get back to those great numbers from 4 years ago? That requires things that Biden and company will not do. Things now are more to Biden’s liking than during the campaign, when he said, “I truly think that if we do this right, we have an incredible opportunity to not just dig out of this crisis, but to fundamentally transform the country.”

Does that sound familiar? Wasn’t it former President Barack Obama who said during a campaign appearance, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America?” Also, back in those days was the idea among Democrats that you “should never let a good crisis go to waste.”

When we compare today’s dismal economy with that of 2019, Biden has kept his promise, where the economy is concerned. And the Covid crisis provided the opportunity.

But not everybody likes the Obama-Biden prescription, and even fewer are doing okay under it, let alone doing much better. And the future does not look like improvement is likely.

Andrew Puzder, a former economic advisor to former President Donald Trump, addressed a National Leadership Seminar audience at Hillsdale College. He said this about what the future may hold. “In a recent Wall Street Journal survey of 23 large financial institutions that do business directly with the Federal Reserve, 16 predicted a recession in 2023 and two predicted a recession in 2024, while only five predicted we’d have only one-half percent economic growth, well below the 2.1 percent average over the past 20 years and dangerously close to what has traditionally been considered a recession.”

So, if things stay the same, a recession is likely. But sensible action on the part of the administration can fix things. Two things are critical to accomplishing this: energy and labor. 

Many people do not like fossil fuels, but the nation and the world still badly need them. Open the doors to energy production by removing the many obstacles to it, in terms of laws and regulations, some of which are courtesy of Biden.

While keeping government assistance programs for those that actually need them, stop paying people not to work so that the able-bodied will get a job. With a full labor force, production of badly needed goods and services will come back.

When the supply of goods and services is greater than the demand for them, we will not have inflation. And we will have plenty of the things we need and want.

Today’s political left is hard at work changing many things

August 2, 2022

One thing Joe Biden has done consistently is to support changing things. He immediately changed the U.S. energy status as an energy independent nation and a net exporter of energy achieved under Donald Trump, by restricting the nation’s ability to maintain that status.

And, during the Biden rule, definitions of well-known things have changed. A woman is a female of the species, with certain distinct qualities different from a male/man. Biden’s pick for Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Ketanji Jackson Brown — a woman, by traditional standards — admitted in a Senate hearing that she was unable to define what a woman is. Today, many argue that the terms “woman” and “mother” are bad, and want to replace them with “birthing person.”

The recent porousness of the southern border allows tens of thousands of illegal aliens to enter the country each month. But the Biden administration has changed the definition of a “secure border” to include this travesty. The Border “Czar” — Vice President Kamala Harris — has done nothing to secure the border, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, even said recently that the southern border is “not open” and is “secure.”

And just recently, when the second successive quarter of negative Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was announced, qualifying the U.S. as being in a recession — according to the long-standing measure used to determine what constitutes a “recession” — the Biden administration changed the definition of what constitutes a recession.

Yes, there are some positive economic factors, like a decent unemployment rate, and the recent negative GDP rate was not as low as the first one. But the high inflation rate and other factors show the overall economic picture as obviously negative.

Along with changing definitions, Biden is working to change the country. The standards and processes that have served us so well for more than two hundred years are no longer good enough. Packing the Supreme Court, doing away with the Senate filibuster, getting rid of the Electoral College are some of the things on the list.

It’s not that these features don’t work anymore, it’s that they are obstacles to the radical left agenda.

Biden rattled off a few positive economic figures recently, ending by saying, “That doesn’t sound like a recession to me,” just before making a hasty exit from the press. But let’s look at the numbers.

The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR), according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is “the number of people in the labor force as a percentage of the civilian non-institutional population […] the participation rate is the percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work.”

The LFPR in January of 2017 was 62.8% (160,320,000 Americans) when Donald Trump took office. It rose to 63.4% (162,007,000 people) by Feb. 2018, meaning there were a good many more people working or looking for a job than at the beginning of Trump’s term. And then the pandemic hit.

The LFPR dropped to a low of 60.2% (160,074,000 people) in April of 2020, but rose to 61.4% (161,200,000 people) in Jan. 2021, a gain of 1.2% in 8 months, reflecting the re-entering of hundreds of thousands to the labor force.

It now stands at 62.2% as of June 2022. In the 17 months that Joe Biden has been President, the LFPR has risen 0.8%, representing a fraction of those who lost jobs or stopped working during the pandemic re-entering the labor force.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the Unemployment Rate like this: “Perhaps the most widely known labor market indicator, this statistic reflects the number of unemployed people as a percentage of the labor force.”

The unemployment rate was 4.7% in January of 2017 when Donald Trump took office. In Feb 2020, when the effects of the pandemic hit, the unemployment rate was 3.5%.

It is now. 3.6% as of June 2022. While this is a good unemployment rate, it is not as good as it was before the pandemic.

After the 17 months Biden has been in office, as of the end of June, there are fewer people in the labor force today than there were when Trump took office, and when the pandemic began.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce tells us that right now, the latest data shows that we have over 11 million job openings in the U.S., but only 6 million unemployed workers looking for work. 

The most serious aspects of the pandemic are virtually over, and there are nearly twice as many unfilled jobs as there are people looking for work. The labor force is 3.2 million people smaller than before the pandemic. The difference is those who were working and have either retired, or no longer need to work due to government subsidy payments in the name of helping people get through the pandemic.

These numbers support the idea that the country is in a recession. There’s not enough lipstick to put on the recession pig to hide reality.

The coronavirus COVID-19 problems are not limited to illness

The coronavirus COVID-19 situation threatens both the health of the people and nation’s economic health. And efforts to protect either side of that coin can endanger the other side.

Keeping Americans safe from the virus and possible death is of greatest importance, but when the virus crisis is over, we don’t want to find a decimated American economy, with hundreds or thousands of businesses permanently shuttered, and thousands or millions of previously employed Americans on the unemployment line.

These are the two serious challenges from the virus, and negotiating the proper balance between them is a tricky task. We want to keep people separated from others to reduce the spread of the virus, but we can’t keep the economy in this heavily shut-down state for so long that it does serious damage.

The White House Coronavirus Task Force is staffed with medical professionals and scientists who are advising President Donald Trump on how the country should respond to this crisis.

The actions that have been taken to slow the spread of COVID-19 were based on the Imperial College London Model developed by Professor Neil Ferguson. The Imperial model predicted that up to 2.2 million Americans could die from the virus if nothing is done to stop it, and that it would peak in June. The recommended social distancing and self-isolation policies were put in place in response to that study.

Then last week Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta published an article on another model of the virus developed at her university. The Oxford model suggests that the virus had been in the UK for at least a month earlier than originally thought, and if so, then perhaps as much as half the population had already been exposed to it, and most cases resolved themselves without any medical issues, and without an awareness that a new virus was present.

“I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” Gupta commented, arguing that the model is highly flawed.

The same condition that Gupta’s model suggests occurred in the UK may also have existed in the U.S. People with the same symptoms as with COVID-19 infection would not have been diagnosed with a COVID-19 infection, since we had little or no information on the virus, or didn’t know it was present in the country at that time. Ferguson has now revised his initial predictions downward, but believes the Oxford model is too optimistic.

The economy is struggling, and the longer these measures are in place, the worse it will get. Many businesses have closed or are working on reduced hours, and many workers have been laid off, schools are closed and children are at home. 

The longer businesses are closed or experiencing substantially lower revenue, the greater the chances that many will die and be unable to reopen, millions will be unemployed, due to the resulting job shortage. And then there is the shortage of goods and services these closed businesses are no longer producing.

Economist Thomas Friedman addresses the situation that the coronavirus taskforce faces in an op-ed in The New York Times. “Our leaders are not flying completely blind: They are working off the advice of serious epidemiologists and public health experts,” he wrote. “Yet we still need to be careful about ‘group think,’ which is a natural but dangerous reaction when responding to a national and global crisis. We’re making decisions that affect the whole country and our entire economy — therefore, small errors in navigation could have huge consequences.”

Acknowledging the seriousness of the virus and the critical need for doctors and nurses, hospital beds, critical care beds and medical equipment for those who are suffering, Friedman calls for rapid, and widespread testing to “surgically minimize the threat of this virus to those most vulnerable while we maximize the chances for as many Americans as possible to safely go back to work as soon as possible.” He then cited an unnamed expert who thinks that “could happen in as early as a few weeks.”

It is imperative that businesses should reopen as soon as they can do so safely, so that people can get back on the job. Business that are closed cannot produce the goods and services that the nation and its people rely on, and the longer the halt in production lasts, the more serious the shortages become. 

The stimulus package that Congress passed will help people cope by giving them money, but it will not address the problem of the insufficient supply of needed goods and services, such as producing and delivering food and medicines throughout the country. 

The number of Americans suffering from the COVID-19 virus is large, but it is a very small percentage of the population. On Sunday, 138,879 people were confirmed to have the virus. That is a tiny fraction of 1.0 percent of the 330,000,000 people in the country.

That number will continue to rise until we get control of the virus, and we must work hard to keep it as small as possible.

But we must also act to protect the economy from collapse. If we don’t, economic circumstances will add to the number of deaths the virus itself is causing.

Democrats’ anti-Trump activities are rewriting the “Three Rs”

There are several things known through time as the “Three Rs.” Back in the days of FDR’s New Deal there was: Relief, Recovery and Reform. Trying to reduce the effects of science on animals gave us: Replacement, Reduction and Refinement. And now in the days of environmental consciousness we have: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

Some of us, the senior citizens among us, remember the “Three Rs,” as: “Readin’, Ritin’ and ‘Rithmetic” (reading, writing and arithmetic) when we were in school.

Today, we can thank Democrats in Congress, in the media and elsewhere for giving us another set of “Three Rs.” The first of the set was “Russia.” Next came “Racist.” And now we have “Recession.”

“Russia, Russia, Russia” was the war chant of the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency. But, alas, it was to no avail, as Russia’s interference in the 2016 election turned out to be significant, but to little effect, and the hoped-for connection between the Russians and Trump was a nothing burger.

Multiple investigations did not prove that Trump was a Russian agent, that the Russians colluded with his campaign to elect him, or any of the other allegations that were thrown around like the trash found on San Francisco streets.

Trump’s began an association with Russia in 2013 when he was there for his Miss Universe pageant, according to The Guardian. Trump told the paper he wanted to build a skyscraper in Moscow.

For a wealthy business person, a real estate developer, it is not unusual to have business interests in other countries. Trump is said to have interests in 25 countries, including Canada, Turkey, Panama, Ireland, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, India, Scotland, Indonesia, China, Mexico, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel and South Africa.

The Moscow skyscraper deal, however, ran into difficulties and had ended by June of 2016, before the election.

Next came charges that Trump was/is a racist. Combining poor reportage and opportunism, the anti-Trumpers take any opening, however narrow, to assert racism. 

Just because a group of four Congressional representatives who are people of color receive criticism from Trump for their words and deeds does not make him a racist.

Trying to secure our borders to prevent the illegal entry of people from other countries, some of whom are criminals, is not racist. Neither is wanting to send illegal aliens back where they came from.

What such efforts tell us is that those backing the efforts are failures, not that Trump is a racist.

One might expect that as part of this ill-fated exercise in imaginative politics, the accusers might consider that Trump’s unemployment numbers for African Americans and Hispanics are at their lowest in decades, or ever. His “racism” apparently also includes implementing the opportunity zones that help low-income distressed communities across the country, which includes those of black Americans and Hispanics.

The racist allegation against Trump and others on the right has been so widely and foolishly misused that the most significant result of this misadventure is to have rendered the term meaningless. Strike 2.

And now, because the yield curve inverted for a day or so, we are told the nation is headed for a recession. As some know, there is a recession in our future because behind every period of expansion is a period of recession. It’s the business cycle.

After the 2007-2008 recession, the economy experienced its slowest recovery ever, but has been doing pretty well in the expansion phase, with nearly all of the good things occurring since election night 2016. Sound Trump economic policies have proved their worth. 

An inverted yield curve is considered an omen of a recession in 17 to 22 months. However, a lot can happen in that period that could delay the economy going into recession for a fairly long time. The left’s prognostications are, to put it politely, premature.

But as Obama administration member Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.” And a recession, when we have the next one, might be a serious crisis. Emanuel, who was at the time the White House chief of staff, went on to explain himself: “And what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Clearly the Russia and Racist opportunities did not pan out, so perhaps the Recession one will. No doubt the left media and others who can benefit from this scare will take it to the limit, one more time.

But if a recession doesn’t do the trick, maybe after this third R is exhausted the left will give us another R: Regret. As in, “we regret going down these curvy, pot hole infested side roads, trying desperately to remove from office a duly elected president that we just do not like, and now we will live with the decision of the American people.”

Given the manic behavior of Trump’s political enemies in Congress, the media and elsewhere, such a thing may be a futile hope. However, hardly anything would benefit the country more than the anti-Trumpers getting their over-worked emotions under control, returning to doing their jobs properly, and helping the country move forward.