We’ve suspected that one reason Republicans were willing to default on the nation’s debt and trigger a global recession was because the economy has steadily improved on President Joe Biden’s watch. It’s hard to win swing seats on an all-drag queens, all-the-time platform.
Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that inflation rose at a four percent annual rate in May. That’s down from 4.9 percent in April. It’s the lowest since March 2021 when inflation was starting to rise to levels not seen in more than 40 years. Hey, maybe the Inflation Reduction Act actually helped reduce inflation. It wasn’t just a pleasing title masking a big disaster, like Diana: The Musical.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced separately that the average hourly earnings adjusted for inflation rose 0.3 percent last month. Your “real earnings” are up annually by 0.2 percent after two years of everyone receiving an inflationary pay cut. Go buy that Jag!
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How Is This Terrific May Jobs Report Bad News For Joe Biden?
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It’s Not Inflation, It’s Greed
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times in a premature midterm obit that it was “very hard [for Democrats ] to have an economic message.” She said, “There is not an easy fix for inflation — the fix is a recession.”
Well, inflation is down, and I don’t see any recession.
Food is still hella expensive, with prices up 6.7 percent from last year. However, the cost of eggs fell 13.8 percent in May after a recent surge that had nothing to do specifically with Joe Biden, Dylan Mulvaney, or critical race theory, but for a few weeks there, Republicans acted as if Biden had personally denied Americans their omelettes.
Core inflation, which excludes the food and energy sectors, rose 0.4 percent and was still up 5.3 percent from a year ago, so everything’s not all rosy for consumers. The price of shelter also increased eight percent, and shelter is my favorite place to live. Transportation services are up 10.2 percent. However, Forbes reports that gas prices dropped $1.50 since hitting record highs last June. (Seriously, 2022 inflation and gas prices only underscore how miraculous it is that Democrats fended off a substantial red wave.)
Airline fares also had a 13.4 percent decline from last year. There’s now even less reason to fly Southwest.
The economy added 339,000 jobs in May (better than the 190,000 Dow Jones estimate). It was the 29th consecutive month of positive job growth, and Biden rightly boasted, “We have now created over 13 million jobs since I took office. That is more jobs in 28 months than any President has created in an entire four-year term.” (Unfortunately, the unemployment rate for Black women has increased over the past few months.)
Republicans, whom most voters can’t stand, are reduced to playing Gloomy Gus over objectively positive news. The Republican National Committee tweeted Tuesday, “61 percent of workers report living paycheck-to-paycheck in Biden’s America.”
It’s true that due to a rising cost of living in 2022, an estimated 64 percent of Americans reported living paycheck-to-paycheck. Of course, Republicans have no solutions for this other than cutting rich people’s taxes and reducing social services. They oppose increasing the federal minimum wage, which has remained stagnant since 2009.
However, as former Senate candidate Amy McGrath pointed out, a whopping 78 percent of workers reported living paycheck-to-paycheck when Donald Trump was president. Sixty-one percent is less than 78 percent, if you care about things like “math.”
Meanwhile, manufacturing in the country is actually starting to exist again — Paul Krugman describes the growth in manufacturing investment as “parabolic,” which you can see here:
Only one party is seriously interested in improving the economy for everyone, and you can see the results when Democrats are in power.
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