If you ask Joe Biden, when it comes to the economy, he’s the most successful president in the history of everything. He’s been regularly taking credit for any positive economic indicator he can spin. For example, on Thursday Biden touted wage growth as the latest success he’s delivered for the American people.
“We have seen historic success on the first priority, with the greatest year of job growth in history, Americans finding better jobs, better wages, and better benefits, along with the fastest economic growth in decades,” Biden said in a statement. He also insisted that “forecasters continue to project inflation easing substantially by the end of 2022,” and that “we saw positive real wage growth last month, and moderation in auto prices, which have made up about a quarter of headline inflation over the last year. ”
“We will continue to fight for costs in areas that have held back families and working people for decades, from prescription drugs to child care and elder care to their energy costs,” he insisted.
Earlier this week, the Labor Department announced that inflation increased 0.6% from December to January and is now at 7.5% over a year ago, the largest annual increase since February 1982.
But, like other economic indicators he’s boasted about over the past year, Biden is trying to sell the public on a lie. While technically wages have gone up, once inflation is factored in, they haven’t gone up at all.
In fact, they’re down.
“High inflation overshadowed a big increase in wages over the past year, amounting to a nearly 2% smaller paycheck for the average worker,” CNBC reported this week. “Employers have raised wages at about the fastest rate in 15 years, as they compete for talent amid record job openings and quit levels. But consumer prices for goods and services are rising at their fastest annual pace in four decades, eroding those gains for many Americans.”
This means that real hourly wages, which is earnings minus inflation, actually fell 1.7% since Biden took office, according to data from the Department of Labor.
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Biden’s boast that wages have gone up is just the latest in a series of bogus claims he’s made about the economy. Last year, he was so desperate for things to brag about that he even patted himself on the back for a meager drop in gas prices (even though they’re still much higher than when he took office) and infamously boasted that Independence Day barbecues would cost Americans 16¢ less in 2021 than the year before. He’s also claimed his is the strongest first-year economic record of any president.
His most ridiculous claim has been that he created over 6 million jobs in 2021 — more jobs than any of his predecessors in their first year — when he actually created zero.
“The economy — and this is an important point — hasn’t added one single job from the 2019 high-water mark. Not one,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said on CNBC last month. “All the jobs that we have seen gained are recovered jobs that were lost. We’re not yet producing new jobs,” she explained.
Richardson explained that the economy is still nearly 4 million jobs short of pre-pandemic level employment.
Biden keeps touting economic victories that are illusions, and he clearly feels confident that the mainstream media won’t call him out on it.
