Tell the TRUTH About Biden's Economy, Dammit

[B.See]

Tell the truth about Biden’s economy - Vox Exaggerating the harms of inflation doesn’t help working people.

Indeed. The article points out a number of FACTS, including that wages have been rising faster than prices for more than a year now, how our economy is the envy of the world, and our continued low unemployment rate.

But in spite of all that good news and more, voters continue to bemoan the economy, via polls that belie the TRUTH.

For example, 74 percent of swing-state voters in a recent Wall Street Journal poll said that inflation had moved in the wrong direction over the past year,

a statement that is straightforwardly untrue.

Moral of the story: STOP LETTING MAGATS (and the notoriously naive MSN) control the NARRATIVE.

Remember: 10 OF THE LAST ELEVEN RECESSIONS OCCURRED UNDER A REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION. Wake up America!!

[Tickle]

1. You can scream this until

the cows come home and that doesn't make it any easier. In the last few years my hourly rate has gone up and I still struggle when buying food and gas. The prices at this time are unsustainable for me. I end up using credit cards and that creates another problem. Oy😒

[Emile]

2. Who do you blame for the inflation, predatory capitalists or Pres Biden?

[durablend]

6. Who do you think the voters blame for the inflation?

[Emile]

7. Who do you blame?

[Tickle]

18. I'm not blaming anyone

I don't know how this happens. I just know I'm using my credit cards to make it to payday

[B.See]

20. Voters blame the wrong people when they are misinformed as to the causes, which

is, btw, the whole point of the article in my OP. For example, many here at DU have already acknowledged the fact that corporations are deliberately gouging consumers. And corporations are in the tank for Trump and the GOP.

Nevertheless, consumers are blaming the guy who gave them that big stimulus bill. You know... the bill that every single MAGA voted AGAINST.

Another case in point. Interest rates. The GOP has been waging a decades long WAR, against an agency designed to protect Americans from predatory lending and banking practices. An agency whose work has benefited even the GOP's OWN constituency.

The Fifth Circuit declares the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional - Vox America’s Trumpiest court just declared an entire federal agency unconstitutional

Payday Lenders Gave Millions to Republican Group That Backed Supreme Court Suit to Annihilate CFPB - The Intercept The Republican Attorneys General Association fought to help a Supreme Court case against the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

$241M went to constituents of Republicans pushing CFPB changes: watchdog - The Hill

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has returned hundreds of millions of dollars to consumers who are also constituents of Republican lawmakers who support changes to the bureau’s funding structure....

“Republicans in Congress should be celebrating the fact the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has recouped billions of dollars for families who’ve been ripped off by bad actors in the financial industry,” Liz Zelnick, director of Accountable.US’s program on economic security and corporate power, told The Hill.

“Instead, many Republicans are rooting for efforts to defund and defang the nation’s top consumer advocate after they’ve taken millions of dollars from greedy big banks to predatory lenders that want no consumer protections at all,” Zelnick said.

Consumer advocates warn about consequences of weakening the CFPB - NPR

Over the years, the bureau has recovered some $17 billion for consumers. It's gone after not only predatory lenders, but debt collectors and student loan servicers and ordinary banks with their overdraft fees.

Consumer protection: Why do Republicans hate the CFPB so much? - Los Angeles Times (July 2015)

[betsuni]

3. Every time I see the Democratic Party/liberals described as wealthy out-of-touch upper-middle class elites

I want to scream.

[mopinko]

4. it's a fucking economic miracle. but i guess that's a partisan thing to say?

or something. a soft landing was supposed to b impossible. never been done.
so y isnt the biz press, the ‘we just report numbers’ biz press, creaming their jeans over this?
oh, yeah, money ppl want fascism.

[Trashman272]

5. Well it aint great for

everyone . As a retired garbageman,
I'm too old and beat up to go back to work. Living on a fixed income, inflation is making it increasingly impossible to make ends meet. I don't like being told that the economy is great and that I just can't see it.

[Emile]

8. Welcome to DU.

The economy is great.

[tavernier]

11. If you're in a boat surrounded by sharks

why would you blame the only person in the boat who is beating the sharks back with a club, instead of the guys trying to take away his club so that the boat can sink?

Joe inherited the post pandemic sharks who were fed by the previous administration.

If we all grab a club and help him, the sharks will go away. Or you can help the guys who would prefer the boat to sink. Your choice. Someone once said a country gets the government it deserves. Perhaps that is true.

[B.See]

15. Great point

Some seem to forget the Trump trade tariffs that jumped the prices of goods and led to Trump having to give farmers bailouts, or Trump's so-called "tax-cut" that really was a fat cat cash cow to the filthy rich, or Trump's criminal denial of Covid that sabotaged the response and recovery,

or the fact that every single Republican voted AGAINST the stimulus bill, that they oppose student debt relief, free lunch programs that benefit millions of families and children, consumer protections against high interest rates and predatory lending practices, and just about every other DEMOCRAT effort to benefit Americans.

The MAGAS keep on legislating from a pulpit of CRUELTY yet people are mad at Biden.

Go figure.

[Trashman272]

9. Thanks I just

Just wasn't able to see it. Now that I know, I can feel better about working hard for 37 years and not being able to keep my head above water.

[Emile]

10. Who do you blame for not being able to keep

your head above water? Predatory Capitalism?

[Trashman272]

12. Absolutely but

That doesn't make things any easier, and banging the drum of what a wonderful economy it is because the stock market is up and wages are rising doesn't help a large percentage of elderly and retired people. They're not going to blame predatory capitalism when the only card they have to play is at the ballot box. I'll vote blue until I'm in the ground but many won't, especially when they're told life is great and you're just too dumb to see it.

[Emile]

13. We are a hell of a lot better off than where we were

four years ago. If some people can't see that, there's nothing we can say to convince them.

Most of them will vote Republican and happily shoot themselves in their foot to entertain the wealthy.

[B.See]

16. "Most of them will vote Republican and happily shoot themselves in their foot"

As they've always done. Republicans COUNT on it.

Mitch McConnell sat on literally HUNDREDS of pieces of proposed legislation on behalf of the American people, some of it even bipartisan. Did NOTHING.

Then laughed and bragged about it.

[W_HAMILTON]

17. Social Security has cost of living adjustments and it has also increased.

5.9% in 2021, 8.7% in 2022, and 3.2% in 2023.

[Tickle]

19. That does help but

it just shows you how expensive food and gas is. To make it worse my gas went up to $3.60 a gallon
Oy

[DFW]

21. Some will always fall through the cracks, and that can't be denied

Some Americans love to point their fingers at Germany, where I live, and say "everything is free there, such as education and medical care." That is a lie, a statement of pure fiction, often used to point out how evil the big bad capitalist USA is. It's all crap.

Education is financed differently from how it is in the USA, but access to it after the fourth grade is granted differently, too, and usually on a brutally Darwinian scale of merit that is not always impartial, but always uncaring. As in the USA, some wealthy parents send their children to expensive private schools. Health care is insured via a patchwork system of private and semi-private companies, and if you don't actively take care of the complicated paperwork, you fall through the German cracks, and end up without health insurance. Even my wife, who took early retirement at age 60 due to a combination of health reasons and intolerable (mobbing) working conditions needed me to finance her health insurance (German equivalent of COBRA) until she turned 65, when the German version of Medicare kicked in. Good thing, too, as she got a deadly form of cancer at age 64, and needed intensive care for many weeks. She was that one in ten thousand that beat it due to early detection, and the insurance I paid for was obligated under law to cover it.

As an American who has benefited (on paper, anyway) from the hot stock market, with decent wages (not increasing, but pretty good already, so not complaining), I know only too well that there are, and always will be, those who just get passed by, fall through the cracks, and see no improvement in their situations at all, even if most of the rest of us do. It doesn't mean we owe everyone a free Cadillac, but we have a moral obligation to hear and acknowledge them, and there is no law that prohibits anyone from helping out from time to time as they can and/or see fit.

[B.See]

22. Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I am an American, who doesn't benefit from

a hot stock market, and on a not so 'pretty good' fixed income, meaning I'm in the same boat as a number of those who've expressed concerns above. And I get it.

However, I think it important to 1) lend clarity to certain misconceptions as to the state of the economy (hence the rather lengthy article cited in my op) and to

2) place the blame where it duly belongs.

For one, as I (and others herein) have previously observed, corporate America is price gouging consumers. That has become a generally accepted FACT.

And, as I pointed out in a reply above, Republicans have not only been voting against and/or obstructing legislation designed to provide relief to the American people, but they've been waging a decades long war on agencies designed to safeguard the public interests,

like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that has saved even the GOP's OWN constituency hundreds of millions of dollars from predatory and fraudulent lending and banking practices - an agency that the GOP wants to OBLITERATE.

And then, as recently as yesterday, THIS article appeared:

MSNBC Host: Saudis, Russia Conspiring On High Gas Prices To Hurt Biden, Help ‘Their Bestie Bestie Best’ Trump Win Election - Mediaite


So yes. Republicans (and their foreign allies) have been working hard to FUCK American consumers, in every which way they could.

Which brings us to a question posed earlier, "Who are voters going to blame for the economy?" To which I have an answer and a question of my own:

MY answer is: The Trump/MAGA/GOP voters are going to blame Biden. That's a given.

Even though their own party does everything they can to hurt them - with debt relief, with tax giveaways to the wealthy 2 percent, with killing child nutrition programs, with undermining medicaid and healthcare, with fighting a livable federal minimum wage, with efforts to undermine and undercut Social Security and Medicare, and (as pointed out above) with efforts shaft CONSUMER'S RIGHTS. And more.

Yet, MAGAS will cut off their noses, blame Biden, and vote for Trump because they'll be voting for much more odious and sinister purposes. And we know WHAT those are.

My QUESTION is:

What role will SOME play come this November, knowing all the above?

Will some play the role of the useful TOOL? By blaming Biden, and REWARDING those who CONSPIRED to undermine our economy via the nefarious efforts described above?

Or will we RISE to the challenge of PREVENTING them from seizing even MORE power, so they can do us GREATER HARM?