The Economist just did a big cover article on how great the U.S. economy is. Here is an unpaywalled version.
Real GDP is +8% vs. 2019, making “America…the only big economy that is back to its pre-pandemic growth trend.” This is compared to just 3% for Europe, 1% for Japan, and 0% for Britain.
Economists across the political spectrum (excepting the goofy ideological ones that feature on Fox News a lot) give most of the credit to the three big laws passed by Biden: the huge Infrastructure bill (that Trump always promised but never delivered), the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPs Act, which provide incentives to build stuff in the U.S. And of course they credit Biden’s American Rescue Plan, too.
Good policy matters. Time for some skeptical debunking of the economic doomerism.
Biden is getting more done for the people than any president since FDR:
A smaller percentage of Americans are uninsured now than ever in our history.
Child poverty is at historic lows, thanks to Biden’s child tax credit in his American Rescue Plan.
Real wages are outpacing inflation for all socioeconomic quintiles.
The cost of living is actually going down (don’t believe the doomers)
America is energy independent for the first time in 40 years, and has been a net exporter of oil every year since 2020.
The cost of a gallon of gasoline nationwide on average is around three dollars a gallon, which is just a little higher than it was under Trump, and actually lower than it was under George W Bush and Obama.
Natural gas prices are at 10-year lows.
Wealth inequality under Biden is narrowing for the first time in almost 20 years…
The wealth of the lower two socioeconomic quintiles have seen their average household wealth increase by over 50% just since 2019.
The stock market is on an historic bull run.
Violent crime, including the murder rate, is lower than it’s been in nearly 50 years.
There is actually less illegal immigration under Biden than under Trump, believe it or not. (There are many more illegal border crossings now than under Trump, sadly, but there’s an order of magnitude more detentions and deportations under Biden than there were under Trump, which actually results in less illegal immigration now than under Trump.
Unemployment is at almost a 50-year low, and it’s never been lower than it is right now for Black Americans and Latinos.
Average debt-to-income ratios for American families are falling, and bankruptcies are at historic lows.
The average American household has cash savings equal to five weeks of income, which is the highest ever on record, and it’s also the record highest for the bottom half of the population by income.
Homicide rates have decreased since Trump.
Things certainly aren’t perfect, but they are much better for all socioeconomic quintiles than they were in 2019, and much better by many measures than they’ve been in many many decades.
Wonder why they use average instead of median, which would be more meaningful. You can make the average go up just by raising the wages of the top 1% workers.
Theoretically yes, but that’s not what happened. Also not sure if average in op’s case is referring to mean or median, the word average could refer to either. But mean and median are close in this case. Median wage growth statistics are readily available, here’s median:
That’s not to say that just a couple years of higher wage growth in low income brackets will erase the US’s enormous long-standing problem with income inequality. And the top 10% have still been doing better than upper middle class with recent wage growth.
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Wonder why they use average instead of median, which would be more meaningful. You can make the average go up just by raising the wages of the top 1% workers.
Most Americans have no clue what “median” means but do know what average means, sort of.
So you’re saying they know what the mean means!
Theoretically yes, but that’s not what happened. Also not sure if average in op’s case is referring to mean or median, the word average could refer to either. But mean and median are close in this case. Median wage growth statistics are readily available, here’s median:
https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker
And if you dig into data more, you’ll find real wage growth (wage growth minus inflation) was strongest in the lowest income bracket, not the highest.
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2022/
That’s not to say that just a couple years of higher wage growth in low income brackets will erase the US’s enormous long-standing problem with income inequality. And the top 10% have still been doing better than upper middle class with recent wage growth.
I think you may mean median, not mean, if you see what I mean.
Yep, you’re right, I meant median.
Average could be either mean or median or mode or some other esoteric measure