Joe Biden it at it again, gaslighting about the economy, telling an audience of workers in Maine about what a great job he's doing to boost the economy, with catchy turns of phrase like this:

Bidenomics is just another way of saying restoring the American Dream. 

He's yapping this:

We’ve created over 13 million new jobs — more than before the pandemic.  Nearly 28,700 here in Maine.  (Applause.)  Eight — eight hundred thousand new manufacturing jobs nationwide.  We’ve attracted almost a half a billion dollar- — half a trillion dollars in outside private investment to grow the economy, because they know it’s available now.

And extolling that:

Now one reason he have inflation fall by two thirds without losing jobs is that we’re seeing corporate profits start to fall as well.  We have more to do, but I like what I said: Inflation is now at the lowest point it’s been in over two years.

In fact, we have the lowest rate of inflation among the world’s major economies.  Every major economy in the world, our inflation rate is lower.  We’re growing faster.  We’re economically more advanced than every other major country in the world.  It’s down from 9 percent to 3 percent, and it’s going to continue to go down.

While there is more work ahead, earlier this week, the Washington Post suggested Republicans may have to find something else to criticize me for — (laughter) — now that inflation is coming down.  Maybe they’ll decide to impeach me because it’s coming down.  I don’t know.  I love that one.  Well, anyway, that’s another story.

So a good economist who understands economics has come forward and written an essay to show why Joe has no idea what he's talking about.

According to Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who wrote a column in Fortune magazine, jobs are not what he says they are:

President Biden is understandably elated at the job figures. His administration keeps bragging that it has “created” some 13.4 million jobs since he took office. The truth told by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, is that only slightly more than 2 million more people are employed today than on the eve of the pandemic, meaning that more than 11 million of the 13.4 million weren’t “created,” but simply came back after the pandemic shutdowns were ended.

Which is miserable stuff, given that he's had three years to do it.

Biden's proud claims about falling corporate profits sounds like a stock market nightmare -- and all by itself sounds like a job killer, given where jobs come from. No wonder there are so few new jobs being created.

And as for inflation, Vargas Llosa brooks no fools, which is bad news for Joe:

Recent data on the inflation rate, GDP growth, and jobs from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics have given the Biden administration reason to brag about the economy. One ardently hopes this is purely political grandstanding rather than a real assessment of where things stand. If not, it means the administration doesn’t understand the true state of the American economy–and, more importantly, the fact that it’s been declining now for decades and urgently needs to be overhauled.

Vargas Llosa then gets down to brass tacks on inflation:

To begin with, the Consumer Price Index figure showing the year-over-year inflation rate declining to 3% was greatly influenced by a 16% drop in energy prices. A more realistic picture of inflation, the so-called “trimmed-mean CPI,” which removes high and low outliers, like the energy price drop, shows inflation still running at 5%. This is on top of the 4.7% increase that hit U.S. consumers in 2021 and the 8% price spike in 2022.

If we continue down this path, it will mean a nearly 20% decline in purchasing power in just three years (and that assumes the prices of oil and other commodities will stay low, which, given the ongoing war in Europe and the fundamentals of supply and demand, seems unlikely).

Real average hourly earnings, meanwhile, have declined since March 2020, when the pandemic closures began.

That jibes with the TIPP CPI, or, Bidenflation index, which carefully tracks inflation's progress from the start of the Biden administration to the most recent figure, piling up inflation figure upon inflation figure dating from the start of the Biden era instead of just reading the rate that was read for one month.

In a recent blog post, TIPP noted this:

Bidenomics is a complete and utter failure that has led to stagflation in the United States. No amount of sugarcoating can hide the truth. Americans are struggling with high prices. You need $1,000 in earnings today to buy what $862 could buy when Biden took office. Alternatively, if you needed $50K yearly for household expenses before Biden took office, you now need $58K.

The Washington Times reports that inflation remains very much with us:

While the liberal media paints the picture of a Biden-led economic resurgence, the cost of food is still up nearly 6% year-over-year. The price of baby food and formula is still up 7.5%. Fruit and vegetable costs are up almost 9%, and 11.5% for bread. The price of pet food, meanwhile, has jumped over 12%.

How about monthly rent? Up 8.3%.

And while Biden allies such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have been ruminating about why people don't appreciate Biden's great economic achievements, Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke came up with an annual misery index which demonstrated exactly why they don't.

I wrote this about it awhile back:

That's unemployment times two, then inflation, then bank lending rates, then subtract the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita.

Every element in it is geared to the little guy, not the big random macroeconomic numbers that are befuddling Krugman. Notice that Hanke says 'bank lending rates' instead of interest rates from the Fed or something, which to the little guy is abstract nonsense, while the cost of taking out a home loan or a gander at the old credit card bill is not. Notice that Hanke uses GDP per capita rather than the broader averages in GDP that don't quite describe how the individual is affected. So it's a good system, and in his piece, Hanke describes how he came to develop this system, polishing it with this deet or that tweak, in response to other distinguished economists' research.

So how does the U.S. look on this year's misery index?

It ranks 134 out of 157 countries with a misery score of 16.882, driven by unemployment, which is a big one if you are unemployed. It's hard to compare this number to previous year based on the changing number of countries ranked and slight changes in methodology (you can if you want, 2021, 2020), but suffice to say, that 16.882 score for 2022 is quite a bit lousier than 2018's figure released in 2019 during the Trump years, which clocked in at 8.7 with the driving misery factor interest rates, or now, bank lending rates. 

It's all ugly stuff, and Biden himself continues to attribute inflation to Russia and oil prices, blithely ignoring that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, as economist Milton Friedman put it, and the Fed has been cutting rates.

Hanke has directly debunked Biden's claims about inflation, too, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago to highlight a few videos he had made:

Hanke correctly forecast the rise of inflation with Joe Biden's big government spendathon.

Now he says inflation is over, of all things, which sounds like good news -- and is news to most of us, mired as we are in high prices at the grocery and the pump.

But actually, it isn't.

The extreme tightening of rates done swiftly and in big bites pretty well foretells a recession even with prices no longer skyrocketing. As I wrote here:

But .... that doesn't mean the higher prices we see now are gone, they're still high as a kite, as we all know. They're just not getting higher, but they still remain bad in the absence of income and wage gains.

However, that doesn't mean all is hunky dory and Joe Biden can go back to spending taxpayer money.

The 'how' of how this happened matters, too. Based on how much the money supply was expanded (26% at its peak in 2022) and how swiftly and harshly that was reversed (we are at -4% now) recession by 2024 is "baked into the cake," he said. Economies can't take that kind of whiplash, which seems more like something you see in a banana republic.

Meanwhile, Vargas Llosa points to GDP growth as another area worth looking at, and says Joe Biden has nothing to brag about there, either:

Between 1964 and 2000, productivity grew 2.2% per year on average, compared to 1.78% since then.

No economy can truly prosper with a declining level of productivity. Among the most important factors behind this grim reality is the declining level of private domestic investment, which under the current administration has increased by just one-half of 1% (0.53%) per year, about one-fourth the rate of growth between 2016 and the beginning of the Biden period (and that was already low by the standards of previous decades). 

And as Joe Biden bragged about cutting the national debt, which he didn't, Vargas Llosa warned that debt too was dragging the U.S. down:

The amount of debt that has accumulated in recent years is staggering. Household debt is nearing $18 trillion, almost one-third higher than on the eve of the Great Recession of 2007-2008. Government debt now amounts to $32 trillion, a figure that will be dwarfed by the $50 trillion the government will likely owe well before this decade is over.

He warned that there was no evidence Biden understood any of the toxic effects on the economy of debt, and he was concerned that even the GOP's top candidates didn't seem to understand much about this either. 

Reversing the course of an over-indebted, overregulated economy burdened by years of too much spending and political manipulation is a monumental affair. Nothing indicates that the current administration understands the economic mess the U.S. is in, and it’s still unclear, judging by what the candidates are saying, whether the GOP does either.

Vargas Llosa's family is from Peru -- they know how bad this kind of Biden-style mismanagement can get and how low it can take an economy if the course is not corrected. Joe Biden has no knowledge of any of this, just a certain kind of arrogance that since he "runs" America, he's as exempt from the laws of economics as he is from the laws of government.

It won't end well. At a minimum, he needs to be called out at every turn on his gaslightings.

Image: Screen shot from a camera aimed at a television set during a live broadcast