NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {P} resident Biden’s speech on Thursday about “Bidenomics” was one of the most misleading and factually challenged economic speeches ever emanating from a White House. All presidents try to focus attention on the facts that are best for them when illustrating the success of their policies. But there is something in the White House called “the staff secretary process” wherein interested parties factually review anything released to the public so as to avoid embarrassing false statements. Either the staff-sec process is broken at the White House, or a compliant media has convinced them that there is no reason to worry about the relationship between White House statements and reality because falsehoods have no cost.

Let’s start with the president’s assertion that his policies have produced a manufacturing boom. Really? Manufacturing industrial production has declined on a year-over-year basis now for six consecutive months, the longest streak since the pandemic recessionary period. Manufacturing employment has flatlined: declining month-over-month in three of the six most recent months and averaging gains of only 1,500 jobs per month over that period. Average weekly overtime hours for manufacturing production and nonsupervisory employees — a leading indicator of employment — have declined sharply in 2022 and 2023 from a post-pandemic peak of 4.5 hours to 3.7 hours as of August. Real wages for manufacturing production and nonsupervisory employees have declined in 24 of the 32 months Biden has been in office on a year-over-year basis.

The president also asserts that he is a deficit slasher without peer. The way he gets to this analysis, one assumes, is that he compares the deficit today to the peak of the pandemic. He needs to stop his Covid abuses. The world has returned to normal, and the horrible economic costs of the lockdowns have abated. If we want to measure how we are doing today, we need to compare today to 2019, before Covid made the economic statistics fluctuate wildly.

To think about the deficit, one needs to think about revenues and expenditures. The president, thank goodness, has not passed a large tax increase. Biden says that when Republicans passed their “$2 trillion tax cut skewed to the wealthy and big corporations, they didn’t pay for a penny of it.” Well, actually, the Joint Committee on Taxation score of the tax cut was $1.5 trillion over ten years, and that was a static score that overstates the cost. Without digressing too far, look at it this way. In 2017 corporate tax revenues were $230 billion. In 2022 they were $334 billion. It is kind of hard to see the gutting of revenues that Biden asserts happened.

So the record on the deficit boils down to the record on spending. On spending, anyone grading the recent record would have to give it an F.

In 2023, government spending will be 24.2 percent of GDP compared to 20.8 percent in 2019. In the 2019 forecast by the Congressional Budget Office for spending this year, spending was forecast to be $5.3 trillion. The CBO now estimates that spending will be $6.3 trillion. President Biden likes to assert that he has reduced the deficit by a trillion dollars. He got the trillion part right, but in the wrong direction.

Moreover, the point of his every speech is that supposedly cold-hearted Republicans want to gut Social Security and Medicare and other spending programs. But their objective is simply for spending to return to normal. The $5.3 trillion projection from 2019 came from a budget passed by Democrats. If going back to the pre-pandemic level is unethical, is Biden saying Pelosi was too conservative? Does he regret the heartlessness of 2019’s Democrats?

The president asserts that Bidenomics has restored “growth and hope.” The Census Bureau just reported that real median household income was down $1,750 in 2022 relative to 2021. The Census also revised up the income gains under Trump, pre-pandemic, to $5,220. Relative to the pre-pandemic Trump level, again, the best way to compare apples to apples, real incomes are down about $4,000.

Moreover, poverty has skyrocketed in the past year. The latest Census report reveals that the proportion of Americans in poverty has gone from 7.8 percent to 12.4 percent. For female-headed households it has gone from 11.7 percent to 22.6 percent. For blacks it went from 11.3 percent to 17.2 percent. For Native Americans it went from 12.4 percent to 23.2 percent.

Perhaps some of the facts that I have reviewed will be contested by other economists. But that conversation, starting with actual facts, will eventually lead us to the truth. Biden’s speech is not a step in the direction of the truth. But if we allow him to get away with it, we will fail to discuss that doubling of poverty for female-headed households, and fail to do our civic duty to those suffering from recent policy failures. It is time to address exploding poverty in America, not to take a victory lap.

President Biden seems to dream of a world where the term “Bidenomics” takes its place in Valhalla next to Reaganomics. Bidenomics is likely to be a term that makes it into the permanent lexicon, but its meaning in the fullness of time will be accepted to be derisive.