When the White House and its allies are not blaming former President Donald Trump and corporate greed for inflation, President Joe Biden simply pretends the worst price instability in 40 years doesn’t actually exist, instead bragging that our persistently sub-4% unemployment rate is evidence of “America’s comeback” and a booming economy. Biden’s backers like Paul Krugman laud the president for catching the white whale of “full employment” and deride voters running away from Biden’s reelection bid as “inflation truthers.”
But Biden cannot beat the reality that voters despise the economy and blame him personally simply by blaming us plebians. And the fact is that this election isn’t just about the economy, stupid, but specifically inflation, a phenomenon the majority of the electorate has never experienced and decided they deplore.
Nearly three-fifths of voters disapprove of Biden’s economic performance, per RealClearPolitics’s polling aggregation, and another half of voters polled by the Financial Times-Michigan Ross blame Biden personally for his economic policies. Although voters may not understand the minutiae of macroeconomics, they do implicitly understand that multiple consecutive years of his $2 trillion deficits have increased prices, and not only is low unemployment nothing to brag about, but it might in fact be inflationary itself. Most importantly, voters know that the largest impediment to broader economic health is inflation.
A Cook Political Report poll of swing state voters found that a 54% majority reported that cost of living is the best way to measure an economy’s strength, compared to just 13% who cited low unemployment and 6% who said the stock market. Similarly, 51% said inflation was the “worst/weakest” part of the economy, and another 59% said Biden has control over this domain. Unsurprisingly, most voters agree that Biden cannot rein in cost-of-living increases but Trump can, granting him leads in every single swing state except Wisconsin, which is a dead heat.
The concerns of an economy vary according to time because of the structural conditions at play. The Great Depression, mostly caused by the capital crunch created by terrible monetary policy by the Federal Reserve, made rampant unemployment the overwhelming concern of our young population. The Great Recession, fueled by the federal government incentivizing a housing bubble built on insolvent borrowers, resulted in some higher-than-average unemployment, yes, but the collapse and consolidation of the financial system and economic contraction were arguably more salient concerns at the time. While the stagflation crisis of the ’70s meant that inflation was regarded as an equally important problem as the unemployment of the vast baby boomer generation, today’s economy is unique, as our below-replacement birth rate means that inflation is the worst and final boss to beat, and in fact, our ultratight labor market is fueling price instability.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
As I explained earlier this year:
In the case of Bidenomics, the problem is an artificially depressed labor force participation rate. Then-President Donald Trump achieved a healthy level of “full employment” before the pandemic with no corresponding increase in inflation simply because older people still retained their jobs. The pandemic-era spending spree falsely inflated home prices, allowing a bevy of boomers to cash out of the economy and employment prematurely, further taxing our welfare system. Thus, we have fewer workers paying into a generational wealth transfer funding a greater number of retirees, most of whom are wealthy without such handouts.
In fewer than four years of Biden’s presidency, overall prices have risen by 19% while average paychecks have fallen by 5% in real value. The labor shortage, beyond being a mere annoyance encountered by consumers at understaffed businesses, only exacerbates the divide between workers living on fixed incomes eaten by the regressive tax of inflation and the boomers who could not only cash out of the workforce because of inflationary monetary policy but are also receiving cost-of-living adjustments on their Social Security checks, paid for by the very young workers struggling under inflation. Every election may be about the economy, but this one is about inflation in particular, and Biden can continue to ignore that reality at his own peril.