Biden Pretends to Defend His Economic Record

Commentary

The Wall Street Journal, as if participating in some kind of inside joke, published an opinion piece ostensibly by President Biden, in defense of his economic record. It’s a dark comedy. Actually worse. It seems to symbolize that to this administration there is no longer truth and no longer lies. It’s all just propaganda. They believe they can invent their own reality in service of power and do not care that absolutely no one believes it.

The comments alone are telling. There are about 1,500 so far. Reading through them is hilarious, sort of like reading the reactions to a Bud Light Twitter ad. I could not find even one that backed the claims of the article.

The dominant theory of the commentators is that the piece was written by ChatGPT. That’s entirely believable. I’m sure I could generate something as good or better in fewer than 10 seconds. I will not give you a sample so as not to waste your time.

The center of the claim is that labor markets are healthy. That’s the best talking point they have. And that’s telling because the ratio of population to people with jobs is right now at a 40-year low. And that pretty well explains the low unemployment numbers, a piece of data that is utterly meaningless and completely deprecated. It only calculates the people on the market right now for jobs. Drop-outs don’t count.

Imagine bragging about a nation of drop -outs!

The problem is particularly acute among women. They left the labor market in large numbers during lockdowns and shot mandates and have not come back nearly at the same levels as before. This is a generational change in labor participation. The feminine power movement of the 1970s—you can have it all—is not dead entirely but getting there. The Biden administration is covering this up by redefining what a woman is.

It’s true that there are more jobs now than ever, even shortages in many areas, but the number of people taking second and third jobs just to pay the bills has soared like nothing we’ve ever seen.

You know this from your own experience. Everyone has a side gig. Anything to get money in the door. Meanwhile, weekly earnings from workers are lower now than before the lockdowns, which is to say that workers, wages, and salaries have been utterly creamed over the last few years.

As for the hard number of people employed, we are barely above the pre-lockdown levels, according to the household survey, for a net job “creation” of 2 million jobs (not 13 million as Biden claims), and much worse jobs than existed before. Lockdowns represented a major downshift in commercial health and job vibrancy. Biden has presided over the mess, even if the catastrophic decision by Trump to lock down kicked off its beginnings.

It takes some real chutzpah to brag about such a thing. The middle class is being destroyed, demotivated, and impoverished while this administration takes to the op-ed page to brag about it all and promise better times ahead. As always, Orwell comes to mind.

There is a larger problem of a general decline in growth and prosperity, well documented by David Stockman. From his telling, we are sinking into a long-term second Great Depression. Washington is doing nothing about it.

There is an even larger problem in the United States today having to do with a general demoralization that is profoundly affecting worker happiness and prospects. I do like the phrase of Charles Hugh Smith: social defeat.

It seems that social defeat is a scientific concept. It describes what happens to male rodents when you introduce into the cage a much larger and meaner rodent. The males in the cage shrink back, stop fighting for food, stop playing, stop their routines, and grow increasingly emancipated and weak.

In Smith’s view, this applies to humans as well. When you introduce into the human population a large version of themselves with more power, more wealth, and more access, something capable of taking their money and productivity and liberty, you gradually sap the energies of the general population. Everyone feels vaguely defeated and unable to get ahead of the game. They give up, turning to substance abuse, ill-health, and meaninglessness. They fade into nothingness.

This strikes me as a perfectly accurate description of so many Americans today. We have been made aware of a beast out there that is bigger and more powerful than all of us. It is capable of shutting our churches, locking us in our homes, wrecking our businesses, smashing our schools, and filling us with propaganda so absurd that no one in history has ever believed it (e.g., the definition of male and female is wholly malleable). Under such conditions, the vitality of the population is drained away.

When the hegemonic beast acts in an arbitrary way, disregards all laws and norms and instead only favors that which is deferential and obsequious, the problems intensify. And that is precisely what we see today in the United States. The Justice Department prosecution of Donald Trump is completely without precedent and wholly unjustified by any normal standard and yet it goes ahead anyway.

I’ve called these conditions anarcho-tyranny: the exercise of totalitarian power in a lawless context. You never know for sure when or how it will strike. One day it is Trump and the next day you or me or anyone. Any enemy of the state is vulnerable. And nor does it take much to be an enemy of the state these days. It could just be expressing doubts about the COVID vaccine on social media or making fun of Pride Month or really anything. You can be targeted and taken down, brutally and without legal recourse.

If we were going to summarize Biden’s op-ed, it could be thusly: the worst is likely over. That’s not exactly a comforting message and it is not likely true either.

Judging by the comment section of the piece, there is hardly anyone alive who believes this nonsense from the White House anymore. But what do they care? They have the power and have every intention of keeping it through any means fair or foul.