Many people are upset with the economy and don’t care what the macroeconomic measures (GNP, inflation rate, job numbers) say. They watch the meter as they fill their gas tanks and stare unbelievingly at the total at the grocery store for just a few bags. (This video from the Canadian comedy program “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” is a hilarious take on the feeling most people, including me — and, yes, not just in this country — have buying groceries these days, especially when your in-laws have requested a freaking charcuterie board.)
Everyone also knows that American workers have been incredibly productive for the past 50-some years, but since the reign of Ronald Reagan have not had anything near their fair share in that national productivity. In fact, according to our local St. Louis Federal Reserve, our share has been on a general downward trajectory for decades.
What many people don’t know (or refuse to believe) is that Democratic presidents have outperformed Republican presidents in economic growth measures throughout the modern era — often dramatically. From President Jimmy Carter’s single term through Trump’s single term, four Republican administrations (Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Trump) saw about 16.7 million jobs and three Democratic administrations (Carter, Clinton, Obama) saw 44.6 million jobs created during their time in office. (If you exclude Reagan, Republican job gains through Trump’s one term are a paltry 1.3 million.) President Biden's gains so far have come because he is actively investing in the future of the country.
Oh, and by the way, of the last eleven recessions, ten have occurred under Republican presidents. Democrats tend to find themselves moving their personal effects into the White House when the economy is in bad shape.
Scroll through the charts from my hometown Fed and look at real GDP growth, unemployment rates, or any other major measure of economic activity, and it gives the lie, often whopping, to the silly, but entrenched, notion that Republicans are better stewards of the economy. Republican numbers are often, I suppose appropriately, in the red.
It’s worth noting that the country lost 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s “always winning” term (yes, a figure mostly impacted by the pandemic) and we have already picked up nearly 15 million jobs so far in Biden’s first term. Since Republicans are forever calling Democrats big spenders, take a glance at deficit spending — but maybe only a glance, because if you are a Republican voter you won’t be happy.
Biden’s economy three years in is so strong, in so many ways, that Trump has taken to whining that it’s really his economy. On top of that, he says that he hopes the economy tanks this year (so, what, he wants his economy to fall over?) and says that the stock market will crash if he doesn’t win in 2024. As usual, for the former guy, it doesn’t matter what the facts are or how many Americans might get hurt. (If it somehow hasn’t been clear to you up to now, as far as Trump’s concerned the country can ROT IN HELL, so long as things work out well for him.)
Furthermore, your locally located Republicans, in Congress and state houses, are historically to blame for most of the economic woes of the middle and working classes, acting like Dickensian villains while also relentlessly attacking Medicare, Social Security, health care reform, food stamps and workers’ rights in general. They ensure that Americans remain far behind other wealthy countries in terms of helping out young families. Republicans love to psychologically project and deride Democrats for being “elite,” but it is always Ivy-league conservatives, winking and good-ole-boy drawling, who use the levers of government to provide help for corporations and the wealthy (generally cutting their taxes, leading to those large deficits).
You say Republicans are looking for your interests, in the working class, and creating policies to bolster the middle class? Excuse me while I echo my much, much smarter friend Tripp, who attended one of the best high schools in St. Louis (Ladue) and likes to remind me of that fact:
Please!
As a 2021 analysis by the New York Times noted, the usual reasons Republicans offer up for the dramatic improvements in economic performance under Democratic presidents don’t hold water. Democrats, Republicans argue, “juice” the economy by spending more (shades here of Trump’s “Biden’s doing it on purpose” argument or whatever the nonsensical conspiracy theory is), but historically Republicans have had higher deficit spending. After discounting various arguments, the writer concludes that something pretty simple, but critical, is the possible answer:
Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.
Recently I made a few of what I thought were fairly innocuous remarks in Salon about how the economy was doing, and what I wrote triggered a fair number of people. In the piece, I tried to make it clear that my own family was making accommodations to high costs and that many younger people, like our daughters, were up against feeling they could not get their lives started. But none of that ameliorated the outrage. (I expect many of those people just read the headline, which I did not write. When I saw the word “amazing” there, I didn’t think it was wrong but I did wince, knowing the reaction that would be coming.)
Economics is often called the “dismal science,” and let me tell you, most of those messages were also pretty dismal. I don’t even think I was much on the bleeding edge of the news, but whatever. (I suspect many of my correspondents never read past the headline.)
Since that commentary ran, the news about our economy has gotten only better. To mention only a handful of positive things: under Biden’s leadership we have had the best recovery from global inflation of all the G7 countries; unemployment is at historically low levels; wages are now outstripping inflation and many states have raised the minimum wage for the first time since 2009 (and federal workers now have a $15/hour minimum wage). Much of the administration’s debt-relief plan for students burdened with college loan debt was thwarted by those Dickensian villains sitting on the Supreme Court, but the Biden administration announced on Friday that it was accelerating a new loan forgiveness program to “to act as quickly as possible to give more borrowers breathing room.” Biden’s team has gone after the service and convenience “junk” fees extorted from the public when they purchase things like tickets, hotel rooms, and flights. And the economic and security benefits of the CHIPS and Science Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act are just now starting to be realized, with much of the work being targeted to economically strapped areas of the country. Biden has been a historic champion of labor from the White House, supporting collective bargaining and visiting striking auto workers on the picket line. Even if a company works by the franchise model and tries to disclaim responsibility or tries to misclassify employees as independent contractors so the company can skirt providing benefits, the Biden administration has held firm.
So the overarching economic news is finally starting to break out. It has been so solidly positive of late (and reported on by a corporate media that seemed, like Trump, to be just dying for the recession they’d predicted) that Republican leaders have now taken to saying Biden is creating a good economy on purpose. Or something like that. They’re pushing some clap-trap about a conspiracy to fix the economy to benefit Biden. Likely, they cannot comprehend a politician doing anything beyond nonsensically jabbering about “supply-side” trickle-down economics to help the poor and working class. They are so used to being motivated only by self-interest, they’re projecting their self-disdain onto Biden.
But getting back to the economy, one person who wrote me — who I’ll call Phil because that’s his name — made a point I hadn’t thought of: It’s not just that things cost more these days, it’s also how poorly treated we are as consumers by companies every day. As customers, we find ourselves more and more being treated like unpaid employees.
We have macroeconomic measures such as gross national product and the rate of inflation and employment figures, yes, but we need to also come up with some standard economic measures on how companies are profiting by underserving their customers — even to the point of making them do all or much of the work involved in the purchase.
How about Annualized Self-checkout Time or that classic measure of governmental ineptitude, Wait Time at the DMV? Can the Fed track those things, please?
Perhaps the most absurd example of this was exposed by John Oliver’s team in a truly depressing (and, as usual, strangely hilarious) piece on the purposeful and dangerous understaffing of the various permutations of Dollar stores, where customers often feel a human urge to help out to stock shelves, if only so they can get down an aisle crammed with boxes or not see food needing refrigeration go bad. As Oliver points out, Dollar stores are everywhere and are often the only choice people have in rural areas not quite large enough to have a Walmart drop in to destroy their town’s grocery and hardware stores.
Economic micro-insults include such things as:
· The drudgery of self-checkout often with security stops at the door. (Can you find the piece that said, hey, you didn’t train me to do checkout?)
· Few or no people to help you find what you need (Dollar stores being the extreme examples of a trend).
· The deep downgrading of the flying experience in just my lifetime, with no downgrading of the cost. Travel used to be almost glamorous; now, it’s a bus ride sitting in cramped seats next to often surprisingly casually dressed people.
· That “shrinkflation” caused by companies is keeping prices the same but making food products smaller.
· The continuing devolution of service stations. It’s not enough for hugely profitable oil companies to make us all pump our own gas. No, they also want to charge us to scramble around to put air in our tires (if the machine is even working), and they often don’t offer window cleaning mix or paper towels. (I now have a portable tire inflator and keep a few working towels — rinsing and reusing them as possible — and a spray bottle of vinegar and water in the trunk.)
· The interminable wait times to get any help on the phone, while being forced to listen to some horrible music with that intermittent jarring message telling us that our call is important to the company. (The music choices of many companies, especially insurance companies, tell me they’d really rather I give up.)
· The endless confrontational tipping, for little to no service. (The New Yorker just ran an excellent piece on how tipping has entered into so many areas of commerce — read it and you’ll learn what the acronym TIP stands for and why Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert was just your typical capitalist.)
Well, now even I’m pissed about the “Biden economy” — except, of course, none of it is the president’s fault, not even the typically horrid experience at DMVs, which are run by states or even outsourced to other companies. Presidents also have mostly nothing to do with the cost of gas or food, but no one cares to know that.
As Phil noted to me, companies have us all working in small, often time-consuming ways to help them meet their profit goals. There’s no training for these roles, and if you need help — well, good luck with that. Phil highlighted the stress that results:
“Any political initiative to reduce junk fees is welcome, but "time theft" is as big an irritant. The imperative for a four-day workweek isn't so much that it would provide an additional day off, but it would supply the time to perform all the tasks that corporate America has shed on to the consumer. It goes unreported that voters have two budgets, one financial, and one that has to do with the time it takes to get things done. Both induce stress.”
These daily micro-insults may largely go unnoticed, but it’s felt, which may express itself in increased road rage or “Karen” behavior (i.e., aggressive assertiveness from women that men get away with all the time) or misbehavior on airlines. But mostly, we blame everyone in charge for this “economy” of corporate greed we all have to deal with.
So, yes, President Joe Biden’s economy has indeed largely turned the macroeconomic corner, with production up, inflation down to 3.4% for 2023 (among the best of large economies worldwide), but there’s still a housing shortage and landlords are taking advantage of that low supply by lording it over people with high rents. New cars cost a small fortune. And most of us are ignoring requests for charcuterie boards.
As Phil notes, we should bear in mind how all those micro-insults each of us faces every day make us feel about the economy in general, no matter who’s president. We should all also seriously consider which party is historically more adept at improving our macroeconomy in the face of the micro-insults economy.
