this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
155 points (100.0% liked)

Politics

10181 readers
467 users here now

In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it's a political happening, you can post it here.


Guidelines for submissions:

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.


Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

DJ Grothe on Facebook writes:

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. Immigration graph

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. Savings graph

Homicide rates have decreased since Trump.Homicide graph

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.

Thanks Biden!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] megopie@beehaw.org 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Doing better than trump is a low damn bar.

[–] sqgl@beehaw.org 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Nevertheless, voting Trump back in would take US backwards.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 1 points 7 months ago

I do not think any but a slim minority on here seriously believes that Trump is preferable, but being better than trump does not make one immune to criticism and doesn’t entitle Biden to enthusiastic support from people who didn’t want him as the candidate in the first place and only settled on him in the primaries as a compromise.

If a second trump term is as bad as we fear, then the democratic establishment should probably work harder to speak to the concerns of disaffected voters. A failure to make real commitments to pursue significant policy changes is tantamount to voting for trump at this point.