Biden’s Income Challenge

In various ways (hourly wages, total compensation, household income, earnings growth), I’ve pointed out that falling living standards have been the biggest downside of Biden’s economic policies.

Simply stated, inflation has been rising faster than people’s income.

Some of Biden’s supporters have been sidestepping that issue. They want to focus on the unemployment rate (while deliberately avoiding any discussion of grim data on labor-force participation).

Today, let’s look at an example. Here are some excerpts from David Brooks’ most-recent New York Times column.

…in 2020…Joe Biden won the White House and immediately pursued an ambitious agenda to support the working class. The economic results have been fantastic. During Biden’s term the U.S. economy has created 10.8 million production and nonsupervisory jobs, including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs and 774,000 construction jobs. Wages are rising faster for people at the lower ends of the wage scale than for people at the higher ends. …But what have been the political effects? …Biden’s economic policies have done little to help the Democratic Party politically. In fact, the party continues to lose working-class support. …Some of the loss of support is happening among some the party’s historically most loyal constituencies. …the Democrats’ lead among Black Americans has shrunk by 19 points. Among Hispanics, the Democratic lead shrunk by 15 points. …Franklin Roosevelt built the New Deal majorities by using government to support workers. Biden tried to do the same. While his policies have worked economically, they have not worked politically. What’s going on?

Brooks is basically saying that Biden is doing a great job and that he is befuddled that workers somehow don’t appreciate the good news.

As he wrote, “What’s going on?”

I’ll answer that question for him. Here’s the latest data from the Labor Department on total compensation. As you can see, the Biden years have not been good for workers.

To be fair, workers in 2023 actually gained a bit of ground after the terrible numbers from 2021 and 2023.

But, to paraphrase one of Reagan’s campaign lines from 1980, “are they better off than they were four years ago?”

Doesn’t look that way to me.

The purpose of this column is not to argue that people should vote for Biden or against Biden. Rather, I want people to understand that Biden’s tax-and-spend policies have not been good for ordinary workers.

In other words, good policy is good politics. And, in Biden’s case, the reverse is true.

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Image credit: Alfred Palmer | Public Domain.