Numbers don’t lie, but people do
The federal government will release a large amount of economic data this week, including “advance estimate[s] of Q3 GDP growth, non-farm payrolls, the unemployment rate, and JOLTS job openings,” plus “the ISM Manufacturing PMI, CB consumer confidence, the PCE inflation report, and personal spending and income figures,” as Trading Economics reports.
Much of this data will consist of estimates while the rest likely will be subject to the Biden administration’s economically negative revisions. Typically, positive economic numbers are released with fanfare and praise for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris only to be quietly revised downward into obviously bad news later.
The American people understand the reality of their own experiences.
By then, new numbers — also celebrated as evidence of Biden and Harris’ economic wisdom — shift attention from the disappointing revisions. These new figures are often presented as major improvements over the downwardly revised data, creating the impression of continuous economic growth. But comparing overly optimistic preliminary figures with grimly revised data skews the reality of the economy’s performance.
This game of three-card monte with economic data aims to deceive the public, and the legacy media is happy to play along. While some might plead ignorance, professional reporters and commentators have no excuse not to recognize the manipulation. Meanwhile, Americans face rising costs for groceries, clothing, gas, housing, utilities, and other essentials. Many also want to enjoy activities like dining out, going to the movies, attending concerts, and watching sports. For all of these, they now pay much higher prices than they did three years ago.
Joyful claims that inflation has slowed, while technically true over the past year, don’t just lower prices to where they were before. Although many people have received pay raises, those raises are in devalued dollars and generally don’t cover the full impact of inflation since January 2021. Most pay increases fall short of keeping up with inflation both in nominal terms and after adjusting for purchasing power.
Income, sales, use, property, and various excise and service taxes all continue to rise as prices, incomes, and housing values increase in dollar terms, though not in real value. This makes Bidenflation an enormous, hidden tax increase at all levels of government, with prices largely holding at higher levels.
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration’s massive government borrowing in 2021 and 2022, with Harris casting tie-breaking votes on major spending bills, along with the Republicans’ reluctance to push for cuts in 2023 and 2024 drove up inflation and prompted the Federal Reserve to slow the economy to curb dollar devaluation.
This economic tightening has hit most Americans hard as businesses turn to lower-wage immigrant labor, leading to net job losses for native-born American workers.
The dismal result of this miserable game of spend, tax, inflate, stealth-tax, kill jobs for native-born Americans, and repeat has been a decrease in wealth and real income for the great majority of Americans. “The bad news is that over the Biden presidency, earnings are still about 1.3% BELOW inflation,” Unleash Prosperity reports. “It provides further evidence that wage growth under Biden hasn’t kept up with inflation, resulting in a 1.3 percent loss in real earnings.”
The consumer price index has increased by 21% since January 2021.
This economic decline has unfolded even as government agencies have consistently claimed month after month that conditions are improving.
National elections will take place just days after the release of these fantastical figures, with voting already underway in most states. Politicians, reporters, analysts, and others in the media may either be misled by these numbers or pretend to believe them. But the American people understand the reality of their own experiences.
