In what way? How exactly are you measuring “the economy”?
GDP growth is steady and real GDP has hit a new all time high every quarter since Biden took office.
Unemployment has been below 4% (full employment) for the most consecutive months since the 60’s.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) has roughly been cut in half over the last 12 months.
Advance retail sales are at an all time and above historical trends.
How are you measuring “the economy”?
The rate that the CPI is increasing has been cut in half(ish). Cutting the CPI in half would be… remarkable.
Which reminds me of this bit:
When campaigning for a second term in office, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing, which has been noted as “the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.”
You are correct. My wording was just plain wrong.
The point stands however because the rate of inflation trending in the right direction still refutes Sam’s claim that, “[T]he economy is getting worse.”
The employment rate is low because many people are not looking for work. The labor participation rate was 67% before the pandemic, and is now 62.8%.
Also, GDP growth has to be considered against the government borrowing 2 trillion dollars, or al,ost 10% of GDP this year. And, you hace to look at real GDP growth during inflationary times.
The U.S. is now 33.5 trillion in debt, and I believe debt servicing costs next year will be larger than the military budget. Soon debt service alone will be over a trillion dollars per year.
Interest rates are not going to come down. Be prepared for interest rates above 4% for a long, long time. And the Fed may lose control of them - tye last 30 year treasury auction was a dud, and yields had to go up dramatically to clear the sale.
Most analysts are expecting a recession soon. Timing is always hard to predict, but very likely we’ll be in one during the next election season.
There are also major headaches coming for commercial real estate and private real estate as all those people encouraged to borrow, borrow, borrow at <1% interest have to refinance at higher rates. Expect more bank failures.
And as long as the government borrows money like a drunken sailor, expect inflation to remain high, and maybe go up even more. It depends on the policy responses. We are all being taxed through inflation to pay for government deficit spending.
But what matters most is public opinion, and they aren’t buying the happy story:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/03/politics/cnn-poll-economic-pessimism-joe-biden/index.html
The labor force participation rate is clearly trending in the right direction and not getting worse.
The federal deficit is clearly trending in the right direction and not getting worse.
Do you understand what, “getting worse,” means? Even by the the metrics you chose, the economy is improving.
They’ve been predicting that since Biden took office. Biden has vastly exceeded expectations here. It is absurd to cite this as the economy, “Getting worse.”
“The partisan gap continues to be significant, particularly regarding deeply negative views…”
This is not a good way to measure the health of the economy.
What is the antecedent to the pronoun “we” in this sentence.
The one year anniversary of this article is coming up: Forecast for US Recession Within Year Hits 100% in Blow to Biden.
The latest recession probability models by Bloomberg economists Anna Wong and Eliza Winger forecast a higher recession probability across all timeframes, with the 12-month estimate of a downturn by October 2023 hitting 100%, up from 65% for the comparable period in the previous update.
General election polls this early are literally meaningless. There’s no campaign. Democrats love to worry, so we’re going to worry, but we shouldn’t worry because of the polls – they tell us absolutely nothing.
In other words, the proof that the economy is getting worse is some partisan opinion that the economy is getting worse, which is driving people to believe the FALSE notion that the economy is getting worse.
This is some exceptionally shitty reasoning.
No, they are not. Some say it is possible, but most say not soon-
Investors are more and more confident that the U.S. economy can avoid falling into recession in 2023. This so-called “soft landing,” the sweet spot between cooling inflation and a still-growing economy, appears to be a real possibility.
Incoming data has made us reassess our prior view" of a coming recession that had already been pushed into 2024, Gapen wrote earlier this month. “We revise our outlook in favor of a ‘soft landing’ where growth falls below trend in 2024, but remains positive throughout.”… The more dour outlook disappeared at the July 25-26 meeting, according to newly released minutes.
“The staff no longer judged that the economy would enter a mild recession toward the end of the year,” the minutes said, though the staff still felt the economy would slow to a growth rate below its long-run potential in 2024 and 2025, with inflation falling and risks “tilted to the downside.”
Many economists point to the baby boomer generation retiring and leaving the labor force as partly responsible for a decrease in labor participation… However, there are a number of reasons why adult Americans might choose not to participate in the labor force. Students, stay-at-home parents, and the retired may choose to keep themselves out of the workforce, for example.
The cause of the deficit spending is the GOP.
The Dems used to be the party of “Tax and spend”. The GOP , since RR has been the party of “Borrow and spend, and then blame the deficit on the Dems”>
I think Biden is going to pull out another close victory. Trump is likely to have lost some of the traditional conservative voters following the events of 1/6/2021. Maybe not a lot, but it doesn’t need to be a lot. IMHO the biggest unknown is how much support Biden loses compared to 2020. I don’t claim to be certain, but I suspect he will keep enough support from the far left to win the upper Midwest blue wall states. Biden can lose Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and Maine’s 2nd congressional district and he would still have 270. I think that’s the most probable scenario, and IMHO the next most probable involve Biden winning one of the other swing states rather than losing Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.
I grant that it’s utterly shitty reasoning.
But a sizeable fraction of the country has already demonstrated they suck at both reasoning and at information source selection.
As a diagnosis of why a lot of sorta-centrists and r-leaning anti-trumpers might vote R “for a change of direction” I think it’s quite plausible.
Whether that cause of voter behavior, among all the other causes of voter behavior, will be decisive is a much muddier & fraught prediction. Not one I personally endorse.
“Behavior” of course denotes both whether somebody bothers to vote and, if so, who they vote for/against.
There are three issues that could drag down Biden more, though. The first is the border. Biden sold off all the unused border wall material for pennies on the dollar, and they may have to start building that border wall again. Trump will be all over that.
The second is the Middle East, and how that plays out. For one thing, the Palestinians are flashing around a lot of American weaponry. Some are claiming it’s being sold to them from corrupt Ukraine officials, while others say it’s stuff from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Maybe it comes from somewhere else, but we’ll see.
The $6 billion released to Tehran a few weeks ago could come back to haunt them as well. It’s very hard to see where public opinion will go on all this. Draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and leaving it unfilled could also come back to haunt Biden.
Here in Canada we have about 50,000 Palestinian refugees (plus unknown numbers of undocumented migrants), who are now marching in our streets shouting death to Israel. If that happens in the U.S. among the millions of people who have streamed across the border it will shine a new spotlight on border security and the lack thereof.
The third thing will be how the war in Ukraine plays out. If it’s still a stalemate a year from now, or if it starts looking worse for the west, there could be considerable war fatigue that Trump will exploit. If it looks like the war is being won by the west, it will help Biden.
In general, if the world still looks like a shit-show a year from now, a lot of elected leaders will start falling, Biden and Trudeau among them. If the U.S. had a sane opposition leader like Poilievre in Canada, Biden would be toast. But he can still beat Trump.
Cite for 50,000 Palestinians marching in the streets of Canada at the moment?
I worded that poorly. We have 50,000 Palestinian refugees. There are currently protests being carried out by some of those refugees.
Unfortunately, too many of the protestors seem to be young college students, not Palestinians.
Cite please for the locations and number of pro-Palestinian protesters? I can find little in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, the Calgary Herald or the Toronto Star.
Posted by Sam_Stone:
The second is the Middle East, and how that plays out. For one thing, the Palestinians are flashing around a lot of American weaponry. Some are claiming it’s being sold to them from corrupt Ukraine officials, while others say it’s stuff from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Maybe it comes from somewhere else, but we’ll see.
Can you please provide a cite for this claim. Thanks in advance.
Yeah, I found a cite about a small group of the far left planning a protest. Note “small” and “planning”.
A cite for Palestinians using American weapons? Look at any picture of Palestinian warriors today. The ones I saw showed them carrying American M-4s.
For example:
I never said how many protestors there are. Do you need a cite for me not saying how many there were? The only number I gave was 50,000 Palrestinian refugess in Canada. I never said how many were protesting, I said ‘some’.
Do you need a cite for what the word ‘some’ means?
How about any cites at all of protests in Canada, involving actual Palestinian refugees?