Bidenomics: facts vs. fiction

Tuesday was a fun day if you care about economic facts. At the daily WH press briefing, principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton said "Well, what I would say is that the president's economic policies are incredibly popular. When you ask people what they think about investing in our roads, bridges and airports, what you - when you ask people what they think about educating and empowering workers, when you ask people about how they feel about reshoring, manufacturing jobs and investing in America, those things are incredibly popular."

She continued, saying "And we find that when we go out and we talk to people about it, they support Bidenomics. And so that's exactly what the president is going to be doing in Chicago tomorrow. That's exactly why we're talking to Americans about everything that he's doing to make sure that we grow the economy by growing the middle class and give people the support that they need to grow our economy for us."

I'm thankful that Ms. Dalton mentioned growing "our economy for us." That's the perfect segue into Larry Kudlow's economic riff. In his riff, Kudlow said this:

In a big speech today, President Joe Biden once again compared himself to FDR and asserted that the U.S. is by far the fastest growing economy in the world today. Well, in terms of the fastest growing economy in the world today, the U.S. in the last five quarters has grown at about 1% at an annual rate. That’s for 15 months.

That includes quarters of negative growth of -1.6% and -.9%. Then Kudlow started laying out additional unflattering factoids to highlight Biden's speech's lies:

Canada, which is right next to us, just up north, is growing at over 3% – that’s three times as fast. Whoops! Now, most of Europe is growing at about the same stagnant 1%. India is growing at above 6%. China at roughly 4.5%.

Back during the Clinton impeachment, one of the Republicans' favorite rallying cries was "Facts are stubborn things." Indeed they are. Here are more facts, courtesy of Mr. Kudlow:

So, I don't know which world Mr. Biden is looking at. As far as FDR is concerned, that's a longer discussion, but I’m going to say Joe Biden is far more socialist than FDR ever was. However, FDR's massive taxing and regulating policies stifled private investment. He declared total war against business. He failed to solve the Great Depression until World War II mobilization occurred.

Roughly 10 years after the onset of depression, the U.S. unemployment rate was over 19%. That was in 1938. In fact, 1937-1938 was a recession inside the depression. Now, true enough, it was Republican Herbert Hoover who signed insane tax and tariff increases and a mistake-prone Federal Reserve policy that brought on the depression in the first place, but FDR's class warfare against business and entrepreneurs failed to solve the depressionary slump and undoubtedly made it worse.

Things aren't that good. Gas prices exceed $3.50 a gallon on a nationwide basis. They were at $2.39 on the day Biden took office. That's an increase of almost 50%. Then there's this:

Then Mr. Biden goes through the usual nonsense about telling us how bad the economy was 2 ½ years ago when he first took office. This is part of his "Bottomless Pinocchio." He inherited a 6.5% growth rate with 1.4% inflation from President Donald Trump. Today, economic growth is hovering at a stagnant 1% and while the year-to-year changes of inflation have cooled from over 9% to roughly 5%, what matters to middle-class working folks is the change in the level of prices, which is not going down and has damaged affordability for everyday items and contributed to a massive decline in real wages, what Ronald Reagan called take-home pay.

In short, inflation is as high today as economic growth was on Inauguration Day while economic growth is as low as inflation was on Inauguration Day. SUMMARIZATION: Biden inherited a booming economy with virtually no inflation and has turned it into a low-growth, high-inflation mess. People have noticed that their paychecks don't stretch near as far, too:

EJ Antoni of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity has shown, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, that real wages in the bottom quartile fell 2.3%, and dropped 3.9% in the second quartile. For the entire worker spectrum, Bidenomics has produced a 2.1% decline in wages measured after inflation.

In short, Biden's Bidenomics pitch is a bunch of malarkey. It's time to start insisting on facts instead of listening to Biden's fictions. Watch Kudlow's riff in its entirety here: