By Peter St. Onge, The Daily Signal | October 09, 2024
The media’s beloved strong Biden economy is a lie, and Reagan adviser David Stockman has the receipts.
In recent videos I’ve talked about how the blockbuster economic statistics we’re being spoon-fed is manipulated to irrelevance:
- Gross domestic product numbers that count ammo to Ukraine, or hundreds of billions in migrant welfare as if it were making us rich.
- Job numbers that intentionally skip millions of Americans who have given up on the labor force while importing millions of migrants to replace them.
- Retail numbers that fail to account for inflation.
- And, of course, the human cost: seniors going back to work or giving up on ever retiring, record young people who are jobless, living at home, who have given up on building a family. Who have checked out.
In a recent article, Reaganomics champion Stockman put some numbers on the carnage. He kicks off by noting that Washington’s carnival of spend, borrow, and print has delivered nothing but stagnation, crippling debt, and endless financial bubbles that tickle Wall Street’s marbles while leaving flyover country to rust.
One of Stockman’s more sobering statistics is that between 1947 and 2001, paychecks after inflation rose by 1.8% per year. That’s good enough to double every generation.
Then, starting in 2001, it dropped to 0.7%—less than half—through 2020.
I’ve mentioned in previous videos how 2000 was an inflection point, how we half-killed the golden goose between red tape, taxes, spending, and money printing.
The kicker is, since 2020, that anemic growth actually turned negative.
As in, we didn’t half-kill the golden goose. Biden fully killed it.
So, forget the alleged blockbuster 3% GDP growth. Forget the crazy low unemployment numbers. Boots on the ground, we’re going down.
Begging the question: What’s it going to look like when we hit the meat of the coming recession.
Next, Stockman breaks down the alleged 15.9 million jobs created by Biden. He correctly notes that most were so-called “bounce-back” jobs—that is, jobs that had been outlawed during the pandemic then, once Biden was safely in office, the blue states miraculously discovered COVID-19 was over. was over.
Of what’s left, Stockman estimates that just 11% were in the goods-producing sector—a good chunk of which are fake, in government-funded green energy companies that traditionally go bust after a few years, lay everybody off, and pocket the money. See Obama’s Solyndra for a case study.
Scrape the barrel when that’s all done, and we’re looking at nearly half of jobs either in low-skill jobs like home care worker or hamburger joints. Or government jobs that don’t grow anything. They’re parasites.
Toss in the wholesale job transfer from native-born to illegals, and the Biden-Harris economy has actually cost jobs. And with anybody who’s still got a job getting a pay cut.
So what’s next?
For 400 years—all the way back to the 1600s—wages in this country have grown, interrupted only by major wars and major recessions.
So that leaves two possibilities: Either we are in a major recession, which the mainstreamers would laugh off, given GDP is allegedly growing at 3%. Or, worse, we really are in 3% growth and not one dime is going to workers.
That would be a break with 400 years of American history; indeed, of Western history.
And it would suggest the bastards may have finally, after decades of hard work, broken the American economy.
Happily, we can get it back. We know how they broke it, so we know how to fix it.
But it will take a major change of management to get it done.
Peter St. Onge is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
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