I don’t like Joe Biden’s economic policies, though that’s hardly a surprise since I haven’t liked the policies of any president this century (I’ve referred to Bush, Obama, and Trump as the “three stooges of big government“).
Other people have a more sympathetic perspective on the President’s performance.
David Leonhardt of the New York Times wrote an analysis of Joe Biden’s economic record and he lists two failures.
- Inflation
- Failure to get approval of the so-called Build Back Better plan
And he lists three supposed successes.
- Economic recovery
- Infrastructure and tech subsidies
- Green subsidies
I disagree with much of Leonhardt’s analysis. For instance, his section on inflation does not mention the Federal Reserve. That’s sort of like writing about World War II and not mentioning Germany (other journalists have made the same mistake).
Moreover, I also think the failure of Build Back Better was good for the nation. And also good for Biden’s political prospects since it is less likely the economy will be sluggish as we approach the 2024 election.
Switching to the so-called successes, I don’t think the passage of the boondoggle infrastructure bill will have a positive effect. The same is true for the handouts to the semiconductor industry or the green lobby.
But I want to focus mostly on what Leonhardt wrote about the economy.
His main contention is that Biden is a success because the unemployment rate is low. Yet that overlooks the fact that labor force participation is weak, so I don’t view that as a Biden “success” (and I have been raising this concern since way before Biden took office).
But a far bigger problem with Leonhardt’s analysis about the economy is that he wrote nothing about living standards. I don’t know if that was a deliberate omission, but almost everything his readers should have learned is captured by this chart from the Department of Labor.
In the interest of full disclosure, I highlighted the “0.0” line in orange because I wanted to emphasize that inflation-adjusted worker compensation has been negative for the entirety of the Biden presidency.
By the way, it would be perfectly reasonable for a Biden defender to point out that worker compensation was already dropping when he took office. And it also would be reasonable for a Biden defender (or even a Trump defender) to blame that drop on the pandemic.
A Biden defender also could claim that the trend in recent months has been positive and that we might actually see rising living standards in the future.
However, those caveats don’t change the fact the Leonhardt’s article fails to mention the economic data that arguably matters most to people. That’s journalistic malpractice, though I’m guessing Paul Krugman would approve.
P.S. Leonhardt’s failure to mention living standards is not the worst example of journalistic malpractice at the New York Times. That award goes to the three reporters who wrote a big story about Venezuela’s economic failure and never once mentioned socialism.
