Despite the majority of the country agreeing that the economy is in disarray, President Joe Biden dedicated the opening of his second State of the Union address trying to put lipstick on the pig.
"Two years ago, our economy was reeling," Biden said, comparing the peak of the pandemic to today. "As I stand here tonight, we have created a record 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years."
DO NOT TIP 20% AT A COFFEE CART
Unsurprisingly, Biden is getting ahead of himself. It's true that Biden has benefited from beginning his presidency when the vaccines developed under his predecessor hit the market, ending the once-in-a-generation supply shock of a global pandemic. But boasting of a two-year job recovery rate discounts the odds of an imminent recession that the Federal Reserve might have to engineer just to offset the president's reckless fiscal policy.
That brings us to inflation, which Biden mentioned just five times in the speech.
"To build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not from the top down," Biden said at the beginning of his speech. "Because when the middle class does well, the poor have a ladder up, and the wealthy still do very well. We all do well."
Inflation — which, despite Biden's boasts, remains more than three times the Federal Reserve's target rate — has disproportionately harmed the middle class. And yes, Biden is directly, at least in part, to blame.
Thanks to the sharp spike of price levels from 2021 to 2022, the purchasing power of the middle class fell by nearly 3% while it rose for the top and bottom quintiles of earners. The result? More than three in four middle-income earners reporting a decline in their personal financial situations.
Against the counsel of even liberal economists, Biden decided to risk the value of the greenback to finance his spending sprees, and the middle class has paid the price with the worst inflation in 40 years. He can try to distract with our extremely modest job recovery, but according to the numbers, the average person (and their wallets) aren't buying it.