Occasional President Joe Biden and the shadowy cabal running his brain want you to know that his “plan” for the economy is working, despite your real-world experiences to the contrary.
This column is being written several hours ahead of Biden’s State of the Union address, in which he will no doubt insist that he has presided over the greatest economic growth in the history of everything. Democrats in the chamber will give him a standing-ovation or two while he trumpets his “success” in handling the economy.
Meanwhile, here in real America, we’re all still paying more for everything, and our monthly budgets aren’t helped by macroeconomic lectures from the bubble people in Washington, D.C.
The federal officials governing this country take on a “Court at Versailles” air more and more every day. They are involved in crafting legislation and making up regulations that affect our everyday lives, all the while being so detached from our experience that it sometimes seems like we don’t live in the same country.
All of this real life out here in the hinterlands is making most Americans immune to the overwhelming spin from Biden and Company.
Americans remain pessimistic about the economy despite huge job growth and cooling inflation.
A slew of recent polls reveal that Americans are still struggling with high costs and aren’t convinced that the U.S. can stave off a recession as the Federal Reserve takes steps to slow the economy down.
That presents a challenge for President Biden, who took a victory lap last week after federal data showed that the U.S. added a shocking 517,000 jobs in January, blowing away analysts’ predictions of slowing job growth. The unemployment rate fell to 3.4 percent, the lowest since 1969.
Side note: these are the same people who keep using a “labor shortage” argument for throwing our borders wide open. Which is it? Are a lot people working or are there a zillion unfilled jobs floating around in the ether?
The D.C. types have lost the thread because they don’t understand kitchen table economic issues anymore. At all.
The average American working on a weekly household budget isn’t locking into what the Federal Reserve is up to or what the latest economic report from the government said. They’re looking at how much things cost at the grocery store that day. Personally, I can attest to the fact that the jobs report did absolutely nothing to lower my food bill.
People who are financially struggling right now because of the mountain of inflation they’ve been buried under thanks to Biden and Congress’s profligate spending don’t have the luxury of taking comfort in how the long game might play out. The here and now is still ugly:
Inflation is still top of mind for voters. And while inflation has come down in recent months — prices fell 0.1 percent from December to January, according to the Labor Department — the cost of essential goods and services remains elevated.
Real wages have seen recent gains but are still down 1.7 percent from last year. Housing costs are up 7.5 percent year over year, while grocery prices increased 11.8 percent annually and continue to rise even as the price of other goods falls, according to Labor Department data.
Patricia Rojas, a New York City-based hotline and database manager at anti-hunger nonprofit WhyHunger, said that more people are calling in to get access to food pantries due to higher grocery prices.
There’s not typically a run on food banks when the economy is robust and chugging along.
The financial concerns that can overwhelm many of us are petty and easily ignored by our elected officials in Washington. Members of Congress have an annual base pay of $174,000. One can weather a two-dollar increase in the price of a dozen eggs on that salary. Most of them also had money before they were elected, and there’s always some good side-hustle cash to be made once in office, so they’re not sweating anything.
Joe Biden has been sucking off of the taxpayer teat for half of a century now. At his sharpest, he wouldn’t know how to spell “grocery budget.” If he has even been inside of a grocery store in the last 50 years, it was for a photo op. He thinks Costco is an island in the Mediterranean Sea.
Biden and his delusional band of bureaucratic highway robbers can pat themselves on the back all they want for their alleged economic successes. Most of us outside of the D.C. bubble will continue getting smacked in the bank account by reality.
It’s a shame we can’t barter political spin for a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs.
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