3w ago

Biden says he's leaving economy 'stronger than ever' for Americans as his term nears end

www.pbs.org WATCH: Biden says he's leaving economy 'stronger than ever' for Americans as his term nears end

President Joe Biden lauded his administration’s record on the economy after the labor department reported Friday a surge in job growth and decline in unemployment last month.

Summary

President Joe Biden highlighted his administration's economic record, citing consistent job growth and a 2.7% inflation rate drop from its 2022 peak.

December's jobs report showed 256,000 new jobs and declining unemployment, signaling steady economic growth.

However, inflation remains above the Federal Reserve's 2% target, and interest rates remain high, impacting homebuyers and businesses.

Public pessimism lingers on affordability as Biden passes a largely strong economy to his successor, Donald Trump.

157 comments

That's what happens when the economic wellbeing of a country is based upon numbers on computers instead of the actual wellbeing of its population. Fuck neoliberalism.
- I dont see how we can't actually quantify economic wellbeing, but I dont know of a unit for this.
  Like we need something that takes into account wealth disparity. If your GDP goes up 5,000% and all that wealth goes into the pocket of a few people, the unit that measures economic welfare should be very low.
  
  The economy should only be judged by the bottom 1% not the top.
  
  You can adjust GDP by Gini coefficient which measures income inequality. Eg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_income
  
  Record Homelessness...
  
  Average savings rate, average credit card debt, number of homeowners, college enrollment rates, average net worth. Lots of measures that the news and politicians ignore.
  
  There are a number of general-welfare measures. Median inflation-adjusted income is a good one, then you can break that into deciles if you want more detail. The GINI coefficient gives a measure of income and/or wealth inequality within a society. Or if you want more effects-based metrics, there are all kinds of quality-of-life and satisfaction indices, with different relative weights for different contributing factors.

That's weird. I could have bought a house in 2014 but I can't afford it now despite making way more money.
- The economy is stronger than ever for Americans that politicians care about.

Stronger for whom, exactly?

When the media or politicians report on 'the economy' they mean wealthy people's money in investment capital and financial instrument earnings, not wages or savings for the working class.

Doesn't matter, when Trump wrecks the economy he will say that he inherited the worst economy ever from Biden.
- Someone should build a site that tracks all these metrics and promises from now on.
  We're all getting cheaper gas, electricity, and groceries right? RIGHT?!
- Recks what 🤦 we are in bottom

That’s because the economy is wholly disconnected from the real lives of working Americans. Aside from 401k, job gains could just be shifting around of people from job to job. If you are in the job market, it still feels grim. The cost of groceries, energy, housing, healthcare, schooling still remain high. And that’s what Americans really experience. A reduction in inflation doesn’t mean prices went down, it just means the increases slowed down by 2.7%. And the fact that democrats are completely incapable or unwilling to have this conversation, is why democrats continue to lose enthusiasm every time there’s an incumbent democrat election. Obama was an exception because of how skilled a politician he was and how weak the Republican opposition was at the time.
- "What has the economy done for me lately?"
  Hard to think of much lately other than give me false hope about my retirement options.

"Empty suit makes grandiose empty statement."

That'll surely cancel out the impending fascism.
- Don't you know, fascism is actually great and they've been lying to us for years because they don't want us to have it. Thankfully trump, the biggest fascist ever, is going to fix that for us.

I suppose I'm happy for the economy. I mean, I'm glad it's doing better than ever, I guess, but I've got my own issues. Sorry if that sounds selfish, but it's just hard for me to get too excited for the economy when I'm stressed about my own situation.
- They made a typo they meant the stock market not the economy.
  
  No no no, they added jobs*
  *Uber drivers

What good is that when we couldn’t sentence the clown coming into office that is going to dismantle whatever gains we might make.

Fuck the economy when garland let trump go. That’s biden’s fault. I will always remember Biden for that.

Yeah, great, I'm so impressed. I'll quit one of my jobs. Thanks biden.

'Than Ever'
dude was a senator starting at 1972.
he's been an active participant in this
Sure, a massive disaster caused by trump et all fucking things up was recovered from. But that's not really Biden's doing, except in the most ephemeral of senses
- yeah biden's really asking for a lot of credit right now for just being an ordinary republican president. we needed to hold the insurrectionists accountable, first and foremost, and he didn't
  
  I thought the president didn’t have the power to do that. What could he do differently?
- That link you provided is excellent.
- Covid was China, how do you figure it's Trump's fault?
  
  He told people to inject bleach like what the fuck.
  
  We had pandemic response teams stationed in high risk areas around the world, including the Wuhan wet markets. Epidemiologists have been saying for decades that it was only a matter of time before we'd get hit by a pandemic, so we opened labs in those high risk areas to detect potential epidemics quickly and quarantine them before they could spread around the world.
  Trump shut a bunch of them down to "save money" (also because it was something Obama did). Lo and behold, COVID swept the world almost immediately after. The pandemic was literally his fault.
  
  You cannot simultaneously ignore all the mistakes Trump made around covid but also blame China just because the virus originated there.
  
  You can't control all the challenges of your presidency but there were a lot of actions he could have taken to reduce the harm done. Instead he worked to make it worse.
  He withheld and stole equipment from blue states and sent it to Russia. He was actively anti-mask and anti-vax. Which both reduce harm to people (and the economy), he postponed stimulus checks so he could put his name on them. He allowed giving away taxpayer money to corporations and people that didn't need it (PPP loans) and neglected the small businesses that could have actually used it.
  
  Surely you're not really this stupid...

He's living in a separate economy 🙄 it's no wonder the Dems lost.

According to traditional economic indicators, that’s a true statement. There is an issue with traditional economic indicators however.

There's also a part of this that could, if you were naive, be solved with time. My job gave me a solid raise last year, 4.9%. Assuming four years of Harris status quo could get inflation down to ~2.5%, and assuming I can maintain similar raises each year, I'd likely recover from the pandemic within the next four years. Inflation is a necessary evil, but when managed over time, it isn't a big issue. Should work for everyone right, stupid Trumpies just don't understand long-term economics!
Except it ignores that corporations are colluding in duopolies across many industries to steadily raise their prices above inflation to maintain profit growth. It ignores that landlords are treating maximum rent hikes as the expectation rather than the exception. It ignores that climate change is globally impacting our supply lines for food.
Inflation being healthy doesn't mean a damn thing when unchecked capitalism is left rampant. The Biden administration, to their credit, did weakly try to fight corporate interests. However, they did nothing to fight the fully captured Supreme Court, which made Biden's efforts so pitiful they resemble a controlled opposition.
- Inflation is a necessary evil,
  Only in a capitalist system, that requires the exploitation of labor...
  
  It's required in any system that uses a fiat currency. Maybe a fiat currency is evil incarnate, but it also offers a lot of conveniences. Personally, I think I'd prefer having some number that translates my labor into spending units, and fiat currency works about as well as anything else when carefully managed.
- Biden did elect a very effective FTC chair. She's done some great work breaking monopolies and monopolistic practices.
  
  The problem, as I alluded to, is that the Supreme Court is starting to hear the lawsuits filed in response to those policies and is striking them down as unconstitutional. It's quite likely that things like NDAs being unenforceable will also get overturned.
  Everything Biden accomplished has either been grossly undermined, hindered, or reversed by the current corrupt Supreme Court. Completely ignoring them for his full four years, especially after Roe V Wade, was pure incompetency. Again, it gives credence to the idea of a controlled opposition. He was allowed to say and do some progressive things, but anything that stepped over the line the Supreme Court would stop. He could have packed the courts, used the big public outcry against the courts legitimacy to pack it with additional judges, and actually make a meaningful change to our country's fate.
  Instead, Joe Biden will be remembered as a vain fool who gave the country to fascism. Nothing else he accomplished will matter, if any of it is still left.

Stockmarket does not determine inflation, cost of living does and we can barely afford food. Joe didn't do shit, he maintained statues quo for the elite class. Eat the rich

Fucking asshole.
Your climate policy is why LA is burning and will continue to burn. Nice carbon extraction economy you've kept there, Joe.
Also your military industrial economy is supporting a genocide. Great economy, Joe.
- How did you expect him to get any meaningful climate policies through the Republicans in Congress?
  
  As if he tried? He is pro-fracking. Its his policy.

Thanks, Joe. More for Trump to loot. Too bad so little of that growth got to median-level people.

Any steady hand would have accomplished this.
The gloating, however, reminds me of my labor union’s incessant self-promotion of how their contract negotiating skills got us a 1.5% increase in a year where the prime rate stood at about 8%.
- He isn't gloating. He's highlighting this issue to undermine common right-wing talking points. He's trying to get this fact into Americans head so Trump can't use it as an excuse to win another election(if he even holds another one)

stronger than it was post obama but not strongest ever. heck that is just going to be harder and harder to do as time goes by.
- Strongest so far in the 21st century.
  
  so um. obama was 21st century.

In this theead: A whole lot of people who don't understand that deflation is awful.
- That's fine, we've got other options. Let's just see how big the disconnect needs to get before we start taking them.
- Deflation is fine. Plenty of countries have been through deflation and they haven't exploded. Japan is probably the best example.
  
  BUt tHeY dIdnT kEep dOmInaTiNg Tech anD cArS
  Which has nothing at all to do with China, Korea, and Taiwan all rushing to be local and global competitors I'm sure.
  
  You mean that period of Japan that they call "the lost decades". No one would ever want their economy to go through that.

Tell him he did it... He finally "beat medicare" and can go rest.

Suck my dick.

The state with the highest GDP in America is literally on fire on his way out...
- Do you think the President is Smokey the Bear or something?
  Natural disaster! Must be that damn Biden’s fault! /s
  
  I blame him for the genocide but not the fires.
- To be fair... that State is on fire pretty regularly, the President has nothing to do with that, the shitty utilities not maintaining infrastructure properly are usually to blame.
  
  Yup, California banned prescribed burning, and now they have bad wild fires every year.

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