If you must argue about the economy over Thanksgiving dinner, at least get the facts right
How the economy is doing has always been a contentious topic, particularly when friends and family with different politics gather for Thanksgiving dinner. And the question has gotten even thornier this year, with consumer sentiment and polling data about the economy becoming historically de-linked from official measures of economic health like GDP. It’s not our job to tell people how they should feel about the economy, but we can at least add some facts as context to common complaints.
Myth: “The economy is simply bad under the Biden administration”
In January 2020, the share of Americans saying that the U.S. economy was in “poor” shape was below 10%, but in recent months that share was above 40%. However, the unemployment rate in early 2020 and the middle of 2023 was essentially identical. The share of adults between the ages of 25 and 54 with a job was actually higher in the more recent period. Economic growth in the last quarter of 2019 was 2.6%, while it was 4.9% in the third quarter of 2023. The economy is growing (at least) as fast as it was pre-pandemic, and jobs are more plentiful.
This higher-pressure labor market has substantially eroded inequality in wages. Consider one metric of inequality—the ratio of the 90th-percentile wage (the wage earned by the worker who has higher pay than 90% of the workforce) to the 10th-percentile wage. Between 1980 and 2019, this ratio rose enormously by about 34%. But a full third of this 39-year increase has been erased in less than three years after 2019 because of rapid growth in pay for low-wage workers, which has not been a historical norm. If this inequality reduction sticks, it could well be the single most important development in the economy in decades.
Myth: “Inflation has crushed living standards and that was the Biden administration’s fault”
Inflation was too high for most of the past two years. But, average wages for most Americans are higher today than pre-pandemic even after accounting for inflation. So, jobs are both more plentiful and pay more than they did pre-pandemic.
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https://www.epi.org/blog/if-you-must-argue-about-the-economy-over-thanksgiving-dinner-at-least-get-the-facts-right/