Summary
President Joe Biden highlighted his administration’s economic record, citing consistent job growth and a 2.7% inflation rate drop from its 2022 peak.
December’s jobs report showed 256,000 new jobs and declining unemployment, signaling steady economic growth.
However, inflation remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, and interest rates remain high, impacting homebuyers and businesses.
Public pessimism lingers on affordability as Biden passes a largely strong economy to his successor, Donald Trump.
Thanks, Joe. More for Trump to loot. Too bad so little of that growth got to median-level people.
According to traditional economic indicators, that’s a true statement. There is an issue with traditional economic indicators however.
Yeah, great, I’m so impressed. I’ll quit one of my jobs. Thanks biden.
He’s living in a separate economy 🙄 it’s no wonder the Dems lost.
That’s weird. I could have bought a house in 2014 but I can’t afford it now despite making way more money.
The economy is stronger than ever for Americans that politicians care about.
When the media or politicians report on ‘the economy’ they mean wealthy people’s money in investment capital and financial instrument earnings, not wages or savings for the working class.
What good is that when we couldn’t sentence the clown coming into office that is going to dismantle whatever gains we might make.
Stronger for whom, exactly?
“Empty suit makes grandiose empty statement.”
Doesn’t matter, when Trump wrecks the economy he will say that he inherited the worst economy ever from Biden.
Someone should build a site that tracks all these metrics and promises from now on.
We’re all getting cheaper gas, electricity, and groceries right? RIGHT?!
Recks what 🤦 we are in bottom
Fuck the economy when garland let trump go. That’s biden’s fault. I will always remember Biden for that.
That’s what happens when the economic wellbeing of a country is based upon numbers on computers instead of the actual wellbeing of its population. Fuck neoliberalism.
I dont see how we can’t actually quantify economic wellbeing, but I dont know of a unit for this.
Like we need something that takes into account wealth disparity. If your GDP goes up 5,000% and all that wealth goes into the pocket of a few people, the unit that measures economic welfare should be very low.
There are a number of general-welfare measures. Median inflation-adjusted income is a good one, then you can break that into deciles if you want more detail. The GINI coefficient gives a measure of income and/or wealth inequality within a society. Or if you want more effects-based metrics, there are all kinds of quality-of-life and satisfaction indices, with different relative weights for different contributing factors.
The economy should only be judged by the bottom 1% not the top.
That’s an interesting idea, but bottom 1% of what?
GDP usually looks at companies exports, not individuals. So you’re saying we should only calculate the GDP from the poorest 1% of companies? That seems like it would be wildly off.
I bet there are way smarter people should figure out how such an economy would work. (Humans have had a top down approach economically since forever.) but it’s obvious our relationship with top down approaches has changed. We need to come together and save humanity, because at this rate it’s obvious our ways of thinking are destroying ourselves and the world.
Record Homelessness…
You mean future prison laborers? Go America!
You can adjust GDP by Gini coefficient which measures income inequality. Eg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_income
I looked at the article, but I have no idea what “0.689” means.
What’s the unit abbreviation?
What does a high number mean? What does a low number mean?
Im not sure about the calculations for that specific value but the Gini coefficient itself is an index between 0 and 1 where 0 is no inequality and 1 is maximum inequality.
The index in the link I provided is also between 0 and 1 where the value for one country is only comparable to that of other countries. The higher the number the better but again not sure what the exact components are as it was just an example of quanitifying inequality.
Yeah, thats not an alternative to GDP then.
Like, if everyone in the country earns $1 per day and the cost of living is $2 per day, the gini is good but the economy is still shit
We need some unit that actually measures if an economy is doing well
GINI, GDP and PPP combined can get you at least a rough estimate.
Yeah. But we need one number to throw on a chart, make a ranking of all countries, and get the news and history books to say (instead of GDP)
What happened to the Misery Index?
I imagine this measurement is probably adjusted for PPP (purchase power parity). Going from comparing the GDP per capita to a PPP and Gini adjusted GDP per capita (like what that index likely does) should be what you’re getting at. Otherwise, there’s HDI (human development index) also mentioned in the wiki that goes beyond monetary value.
Is that a quantitative value for measuring the whole.economy’s success, or does it only measure income inequality?
Average savings rate, average credit card debt, number of homeowners, college enrollment rates, average net worth. Lots of measures that the news and politicians ignore.
Some of the measures you cite are irrelevant to quality of life. For example, there’s only a weak correlation between rates of home ownership and overall quality-of-life metrics. For example, Switzerland scores high on quality of life measures but has quite a low home-ownership rate. The converse also applies. And savings rate can be driven by fear of post-requirement income insecurity, and average credit card debt matters less than the cost of borrowing (if your card providers only charge 2% a year, that’s a different picture than if they charge 25%).
Though your general observation still holds: the media (and politicians) focus on a small number of metrics that aren’t relevant to most people’s lives. You just have to be selective about what additional metrics you want to add to the mix.
Averages wouldn’t work. We need some unit that returns a low number if most of the wealth is in a small number of people’s pockets.
Consider a world where one country has 99% of the world’s wealth, and 99% of that wealth inside that country is held by 1 person, with everyone else literally struggling to feed themselves.
An average net worth for the country would show the country as having a very good economy. But, in fact, the economy is terrible. Because it benefits only one person. That’s a failed economy.
That number would be the median, which is a form of average.
That’s because the economy is wholly disconnected from the real lives of working Americans. Aside from 401k, job gains could just be shifting around of people from job to job. If you are in the job market, it still feels grim. The cost of groceries, energy, housing, healthcare, schooling still remain high. And that’s what Americans really experience. A reduction in inflation doesn’t mean prices went down, it just means the increases slowed down by 2.7%. And the fact that democrats are completely incapable or unwilling to have this conversation, is why democrats continue to lose enthusiasm every time there’s an incumbent democrat election. Obama was an exception because of how skilled a politician he was and how weak the Republican opposition was at the time.
“What has the economy done for me lately?”
Hard to think of much lately other than give me false hope about my retirement options.
I suppose I’m happy for the economy. I mean, I’m glad it’s doing better than ever, I guess, but I’ve got my own issues. Sorry if that sounds selfish, but it’s just hard for me to get too excited for the economy when I’m stressed about my own situation.
They made a typo they meant the stock market not the economy.
No no no, they added jobs*
*Uber drivers
Illegal taxi service! Why didn’t I thnk of that!
There’s also a part of this that could, if you were naive, be solved with time. My job gave me a solid raise last year, 4.9%. Assuming four years of Harris status quo could get inflation down to ~2.5%, and assuming I can maintain similar raises each year, I’d likely recover from the pandemic within the next four years. Inflation is a necessary evil, but when managed over time, it isn’t a big issue. Should work for everyone right, stupid Trumpies just don’t understand long-term economics!
Except it ignores that corporations are colluding in duopolies across many industries to steadily raise their prices above inflation to maintain profit growth. It ignores that landlords are treating maximum rent hikes as the expectation rather than the exception. It ignores that climate change is globally impacting our supply lines for food.
Inflation being healthy doesn’t mean a damn thing when unchecked capitalism is left rampant. The Biden administration, to their credit, did weakly try to fight corporate interests. However, they did nothing to fight the fully captured Supreme Court, which made Biden’s efforts so pitiful they resemble a controlled opposition.
Biden did elect a very effective FTC chair. She’s done some great work breaking monopolies and monopolistic practices.
The problem, as I alluded to, is that the Supreme Court is starting to hear the lawsuits filed in response to those policies and is striking them down as unconstitutional. It’s quite likely that things like NDAs being unenforceable will also get overturned.
Everything Biden accomplished has either been grossly undermined, hindered, or reversed by the current corrupt Supreme Court. Completely ignoring them for his full four years, especially after Roe V Wade, was pure incompetency. Again, it gives credence to the idea of a controlled opposition. He was allowed to say and do some progressive things, but anything that stepped over the line the Supreme Court would stop. He could have packed the courts, used the big public outcry against the courts legitimacy to pack it with additional judges, and actually make a meaningful change to our country’s fate.
Instead, Joe Biden will be remembered as a vain fool who gave the country to fascism. Nothing else he accomplished will matter, if any of it is still left.
Undermined by the supreme court? What is he supposed to do about that it’s a separate branch of government.
The only people to blame for trumps election is the people who voted for him or a 3rd party. Joe Biden will be remembered badly because the right wing were incredibly successful in getting their attacks to propagate through the pop culture.
President has the right to nominate more judges. And with control of the Senate, they could have been sworn in. He wasn’t helpless, he just chose not to use the power he had.
He cant usurp judges with no reason other than political alignment. The bar for getting rid of a judge is extremely high and has only been done once in the history of the US in 1800s. Biden did all that he could he nominated a great judge when Stephen Breyer stepped down. The things you ask of Biden are out of the realm of possibility.
Never said anything about getting rid of existing judges. Did you know there is NO RULE limiting the Supreme Court to 9 judges?
The Judiciary Act limits the amount of Judges.
Inflation is a necessary evil,
Only in a capitalist system, that requires the exploitation of labor…
It’s required in any system that uses a fiat currency. Maybe a fiat currency is evil incarnate, but it also offers a lot of conveniences. Personally, I think I’d prefer having some number that translates my labor into spending units, and fiat currency works about as well as anything else when carefully managed.
Personally, I think I’d prefer having some number that translates my labor into spending units
How about non-transferable labor vouchers?
Even in a system with fiat currency, inflation is not a requirement. Its only a requirement under a capitalist system, that demands profits rise constantly.
