The Biden Economy
The Biden administration exposed the public to an economy dictated by global warming – aka, climate change.
Here’s some recent quotes by some who refuse to admit failure.
“President-elect Trump’s mass deportation proposals threaten to gut the U.S. economy, shrinking growth and the labor force while juicing inflation.” That’s from a report released a week ago by Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.
Citing data from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the report says deporting 8.3 million immigrants currently in the country illegally would reduce GDP by 7.4 percent and reduce employment by 7 percent by 2028, likely resulting in zero overall growth throughout Trump’s second term.
Just so you know, the Peterson Institute for International Economics touts themselves as a nonpartisan think tank. Yet, story headlines on their current website include: “Trump’s 2025 agenda trades US global leadership for tariffs;” “The True Dangers of Trump’s Economic Plans;” and “Trump’s policies would hurt the US while boosting most other economies.”
Meanwhile, President Biden a week ago stated that “President-elect Trump will inherit the strongest economy in modern history when he takes office in January.”
If you buy the gist of the quotes cited, you are part of the 20% of the adult population that apparently did so in the November election – meaning 80% didn’t buy it.
Let me start the rest of this piece with the contradictory saying, “Don’t believe your lying eyes.”
Let’s look at the economic impact of the 4 years under the Biden administration.
Inflation. Since 2021 overall, inflation has taken over 20% more from the average home budget to buy the same things bought in 2020. Grocery costs are up some 24%, electricity 18+%, gasoline up 18% and housing up over 40%.
Wages. At the same time wage growth has trailed behind hyper-inflation, and currently wages stand at 1.1% below the overall inflation number over the last 4 years.
Employment. Pre-pandemic December 2019, 157.5 million nonfarm workers employed: November 2024, 161.1 million. That translates to 3.7 million new jobs under this administration – an average job growth of 79,000/month (47 months).
Meanwhile, the adult population grew by some 5 million, according to the Census Bureau.
That counts some the 10.6 million illegal immigrants and the estimated 690,000 ‘getaways’ that illegally crossed our borders since 2020.
So, adding 3.7 million jobs falls extremely short of the workforce added since President Biden took office. The unemployment rate is low because so many adults have quit the workforce.
Couple inflation with the downturn in the labor market with the Fed raising interest rates, the national debt increasing to unsustainable numbers while growing federal spending, and in addition now paying over a trillion dollars in debt service – and the US economy is left in a mess.
While all these factors were in play, the increase in government regulations during this period has been a real choker for capital investment in the country. The US lost even more manufacturing jobs during the 4 years.
Had enough yet? There’s more.
At the behest of the Biden administration, Congress passed over two trillion in appropriations for the advancement and utilization of solar and wind as the primary electricity generators for the country. At the same time, it gave tax credits to buyers of EVs while urging car makers to manufacture many more of them.
On the latter note, it thought it could force the car makers and therefore the car-buying public into EVs by increasing the squeeze of the EPA on allowable greenhouse gas emissions. The idea was to force everyone into an EV, including trucks transporting goods to markets.
At the same time, it re-adopted the so-called Paris Accord, pledging to reduce the use of fossil fuels in the country by 50% by 2035, and in total by 2050. With blinders-on, the Biden administration focused on solar and wind – and EVs. All the while it had to know that replacing current electrical production with sunshine and breezes, currently providing 20% of electrical generation, could not happen quickly enough to meet the current level of electricity demand.
It has to be somebody’s pipe dream to replace nearly 300 million gas/diesel vehicles with EVs, electrically charge their batteries, including big semi-trucks and airplanes, and move them without drastically increasing electricity demand. Further, experts are projecting current electrical demand will double without EVs as AI and other new high-tech uses enter the picture.
So, there you have it, a snapshot of the short-sighted and expensive Biden economic delusion.
For the average American and family, it was a time that saw a government set its economic policies all dictated by the religion of climate change.
The United States assumed responsibility to lower greenhouse emissions in the world while the 2 largest world countries continued to ignore the “The boy who cried Armageddon.”
The Biden government shut down fossil fuel development, production and distribution, and its transport, raising energy prices dramatically.
Those policies not only saw the country slide back to energy dependence but forced the increased price of basically everything.
It was a time the average American would like to not remember. Inflation placed an insidious high tax on the average citizen as wages stagnated. The government tried to totally force on its population a transformational market for electric appliances and transport by land, water, air and sea.
Food prices soared as the cost of planting, cultivating and harvesting crops for people and livestock soared, in turn raising the price needed for cereal, meat and eggs.
We all got a generous taste of economics of, and living under, socialism.
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Have a great and prosperous week.
Hug somebody.
References:
https://www.bankrate.com/banking/federal-reserve/wage-to-inflation-index/
https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-growth-in-the-united-states/
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_12062024.htm
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This week’s trivia question is: What was the name of the B-29 Superfortress bomber used at Hiroshima to drop the bomb? (if you find that too easy, name the Silverplate B-29 that dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki) The answer to last week’s question re: Who did Mohammed Ali beat to win the heavyweight boxing championship: Sonny Liston. Liston was the World Heavyweight Champion at the time of the first Liston–Cassius Clay fight in Miami Beach on February 25, 1964, having demolished former champion Floyd Patterson by a first-round knockout in September 1962. Ten months later, Liston and Patterson met again with the same result – Patterson was knocked out in the first round. Ali, who had not yet changed his name, was a heavy underdog when he beat Liston in 6 rounds in the first fight after Liston quit. 10 months later, Ali defended the title with a 1st round knockout.
Gee, the initial ‘continuing resolution’ to raise the debt limit and avoid a government shutdown was 1,547 pages long with billions in more spending. How does this happen? Lots of pork which would not be funded in the normal appropriation process in Congress was included. Congress did pass a 100+ page parred down bill a few minutes after midnight Friday. I was hoping for a shutdown while the President was in his Delaware basement.
Fulton County DA Fani Willis and her team were disqualified by a Georgia court last week from prosecuting the election interference case against Donald Trump. Case dismissal is likely soon.
The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 0.25% last week. While the reason for the increases in the last 2 years was to get inflation down to its targeted 2%, that has not occurred. But apparently the central bank is now more concerned by the slowdown in the labor market. We’ve talked about the worst nightmare for economists – stagflation. That’s when a country has high inflation and a weak economy at the same time.
Heard of a gravity battery? It’s really a very simple way to store electricity when using with solar and wind to generate it. When the sun shines and the wind blows, it’s not unusual to generate more electricity than can be used immediately. The excess energy can be used to move a mass upward against the force of gravity to generate gravitational potential energy. When customers eventually require more energy than the sources can provide, the mass is lowered to convert potential energy into electricity. Though solid masses such as concrete blocks can be used, more normally, pumped-storage hydroelectricity generation can be used to pump water to higher elevations and later guide it through water turbines – like a dam – to generate electricity.
ABC News will pay $15 million to “Trump’s presidential foundation and museum” in a settlement reached with the President-elect in his defamation suit against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos. Trump has also filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register newspaper and its former top pollster and has said he would consider suing other news outlets and social media influencers for defamation.
The federal government is by far America’s largest employer. As per official FRED data, there were just over three million people on the federal government payroll in June of this year. The biggest private sector employer in the US is Walmart. The gargantuan retailer has approximately 1.6 million staff in the US, but only half that of the government.
Do you share my sentiment that Donald Trump has been, de facto, president since the November election.
