“Joe Biden lied” is such a common refrain around this joint that instead of writing a regular lead, I’m going to start by begging you to stick around and read the entire column.
So: Please stick around for this one. It’s important.
Presidentish Joe Biden lied about wage growth on Thursday. He lied big. He lied hard. He lied without compunction or remorse. His lie was preplanned.
Lying is what Joe Biden does.
Here, let me show you the latest.
In response to that UNEXPECTEDLY!™ high inflation report for January, Biden released a statement. A baldly lying statement:
While today’s report is elevated, forecasters continue to project inflation easing substantially by the end of 2022. And fortunately 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 separately saw good news with new unemployment claims continuing to decline. That’s a sign of the real progress we’ve made in getting Americans back to work over the last year.
New and used car prices were up again in January. Prices rose slightly more slowly than they did in December, but only slightly. And where I come from “up” is still “up.” In a car market this crazy, “slightly less crazy,” as Lyin’ Biden would have you believe, is not “moderation.”
It’s more like, “I couldn’t afford a used car last month, and I can afford one even less this month, even though the used car is now older.”
But the real kicker was that line about “positive real wage growth.”
Previously, Biden had boasted about nominal wage growth. That is wage growth before taking inflation into account. But when inflation is at 40-year highs and wage growth isn’t enough to keep up, it’s real growth, not nominal growth that needs to be taken into account. When Biden made his boast last month, it was after nine straight months of real wage losses, not growth.
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Biden’s lie was so big and so bad and so undeniably obvious that even the Washinton Post fact-checker called him on it.
Now we’re at ten consecutive months of Americans getting poorer:
All that “wage growth” in 2020 was unsustainable because it wasn’t real. The economy got shut down due to political panic over the pandemic, and Washington was handing out free money like a drug pusher trying to create new addicts.
Exactly like that, in fact.
Pre-inflationary economies always feel great. There’s all this money going around and inflation has yet to kick in. The good times roll, right until they come to a sudden and jarring stop.
But instead of reopening the economy, Biden doubled down on the free money, printing up another TWO TRILLION DOLLARS in giveaways with the American Rescue Act in March of last year.
Inflation finally kicked in the very next month, and it’s been eating away at our pocketbooks ever since — with a bigger and bigger appetite.
I once described Obamanomics like so: Obama took an economy that was prone on its back in 2009, pinned it down with a jackboot of new regulations, and proceeded to hit on the head with a big bag full of borrowed hundred-dollar bills while shouting, “WHY WON’T YOU GROW?”
Bidenomics is different in that the bag is much bigger.
And somehow so are the lies.
