Biden’s Latest Economic Alibi
As recently as last Friday, when asked by a reporter why so many Americans don’t feel good about the economy, he responded with this
howler: “You get more legs when you’re reporting something that’s negative. I don’t mean you’re picking on me. It’s just the nature of things.” Biden actually claimed that adverse media coverage is to blame for the public’s low opinion of “Bidenomics.”
In reality, of course, the Fourth Estate has frantically touted Biden’s few economic successes and studiously ignored his many failures. Moreover, they have frequently attempted to attribute the public’s dim view of Biden’s performance to a kind of false consciousness that has no basis in the actual state of the economy. The
New York Times’ Paul Krugman has been promoting this balderdash for at least a year. In his most
recent column he avers that the economic news in 2023 has been “almost surreally good,” and professes himself puzzled that Americans believe Republicans would be better than Democrats at running the economy. Krugman then offers the following theory to explain this conundrum:
Krugman not only parrots Biden’s “negative media” canard, his claim that Americans view their finances as “pretty good” is fiction. The last Gallup
survey on this question found the following: “Three in five Americans, 61 percent, say recent price increases have caused financial hardship for their household.” As to consumer spending, Americans are using credit cards to offset the decline in real wages. NBC
reports, “U.S. consumers took on $43 billion in additional credit card debt during the second quarter of this year, ending in June. That’s more than triple the average amount of new debt households have taken on in that period since after the Great Recession of 2007-08.” Consumer credit card debt is now over $1 trillion.