Americans’ distaste for “Bidenomics” and Joe Biden’s unpopularity are realities easily understood and explained, but apparently mainstream media operative Rick Newman didn’t get the memo, and penned an essay trying to get to the bottom of it, as excerpted below:
Democrats have struggled to understand how job growth can be stellar and unemployment close to record lows, yet President Biden’s approval rating remains stuck in the low 40% range. An even smaller portion of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the economy.
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Inflation is the culprit. Nominal wages have risen, but inflation has risen more. ‘The rate of inflation outstripped the rate of pay increases so that the income of most households did not buy as much,’ William Galston of the Brookings Institution wrote recently. ‘Americans noticed this decrease, and as the polls indicate, they did not like it.’
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For now, however, many voters sense that they were doing better when Donald Trump was president, even if they don’t like Trump. The data supports that, to some extent.
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Voters tend to credit or blame the president for whatever happens on his watch, but the economy is a gargantuan, complex machine that doesn’t respond much to presidential policies.
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So what about Biden? Voters clearly blame him for inflation that reached a peak of 9% in June of 2022. It’s now down to 3.7%, a considerable improvement. But Biden’s approval rating hasn’t improved as inflation has come down, which indicates voters are still feeling the pain of inflation and not yet in a mood to forgive the incumbent for lost purchasing power.
Destroying the private sector with cumbersome government regulation, as Biden loves to do, is the main problem. The public does not want to be forced to give up their gas-powered cars and appliances, and forced by the government to buy inefficient, expensive, impractical vehicles powered by a flammable pollutant.
His unpopularity can also be explained by the fact that he refuses to enforce immigration laws, and hamstrings ICE and Border Patrol from doing their jobs; it is clear to everyone except leftist reporters apparently, that he is an incompetent, corrupt president who is also a congenital liar.
Newman also notes that “real income” is finally “positive again … thanks to a rapidly falling inflation rate.” Yes the rate of inflation has slowed but the prices have not dropped from their escalated levels; also, Newman should look at real income after taxes instead of gross real income. I am sure that is still down, which is why people have no savings, are running up credit card debt, and living paycheck to paycheck.
Somehow Newman can’t figure out that President Trump’s lower tax rate, decreased regulations, and energy independence policies were what caused real wages to accelerate. Trump’s policies were the rising tide that lifted all boats, and they succeeded despite the massive efforts of most of the media, the bureaucracy, and other Democrats to destroy him every day he was in office.
On his first day in office, Biden sought to reverse Trump’s policies, especially on energy and the border.
Per Newman:
Biden’s critics are convinced that a single piece of legislation — the $2.2 trillion CARES Act Biden signed in March 2021 — is solely responsible for the inflation that peaked a year later, hammering family budgets. That’s mostly false.
This is a BS paragraph. All of Biden’s policies contribute, especially massive spending with the U.S. dollar when we are already $32 trillion in the hole. Somehow Newman never mentions Biden’s massive effort to destroy companies that use natural resources to produce reasonably priced energy to pretend the government can control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity.
He also said this:
Supply chain snafus caused by the pandemic contributed more to inflation, as did massive shifts in spending patterns by Americans suddenly stuck at home, buying everything they could find. There were other factors, too, but as any politician knows, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.
This is also garbage. Inflation remained low during 2020 with the supply chain problems and COVID, and the economy grew rapidly the last half of 2020, before Biden took office, despite all the lies that Biden and most of the media tell the public to intentionally mislead them.
Mainstream journalism is basically a lost cause as people like Newman are essentially campaign workers for Democrats, and nothing but the truth and objective reporting is going to restore Americans’ trust in the press.
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