Imagine, if you will, being on a jet that just took off from the airport. You’re climbing into the air at incredible speeds. But, at the same time, some of the other passengers start screaming “We’re crashing! We’re crashing! The pilot is trying to kill us!”
Now, even when you can see and feel that the plane is still climbing, nothing you can say or do can dissuade the panicky passengers in their hysterical belief that the plane is really crashing to the ground. Even as the plane levels off at its maximum height, these passengers are screaming that the plane is still crashing, that you’re all going to die, and that the pilot is doing this on purpose. This goes on and on until the pilot, tired of the hysteria of some of the passengers, takes the plane to the nearest airport to get rid of those troublemakers, which only serves to validate these hysterical hypocrites in their collective belief that the plane is really crashing.
Then, when the plane has successfully landed, pulled to the gate, and police are called to the plane to get rid of the troublemakers, these same people act like they did nothing wrong, and deny ever saying that the plane was crashing and denied that they accused the pilot of trying to kill them all. They don’t know how “anyone” could think that *they* could cause a panic like that.
That’s basically what we are dealing with regarding America’s economy.
We have two conflicting beliefs going on.
The first is from all of the economic indicators saying things have been going phenomenally great since 2021. Unemployment is down, job openings are up, the Gross Domestic Product is going up and is the strongest it has ever been, corporate profits are soaring, all signs that the economy is doing great. And Wall Street... well, they’ve always been on crack and they’re never a good indicator of the economy.
The second comes from talk radio and so-called “conservative” media and good ol’ boys and red-hats and the party of hypocrisy and hysteria and nationalism and insurrection and orange-skinned narcissists. The economy is supposedly “broken”, and President Joe Biden supposedly is “the worst president ever” who “ruined America”. They point to the inflation rate – which hadn’t grown for decades until recently – and the lack of certain workers in the service industry, not to mention a continuing supply chain shortage. This, of course, from the party of lies and con-games and phony “voter fraud” claims that led to the domestic terrorist attack of January 6th, 2021.
The problem is that, as with many lies and con-games, there is a little bit of truth behind the Trumpist hysteria about our economy.
Inflation really is an issue. We’ve been getting more money in the past year, either through the relief package Biden got passed last year, or through higher-than-normal raises from our employers, but it also costs us more to buy the stuff we need compared to previous years. And that’s presuming that we can get the stuff we need thanks to the ongoing global supply chain problems, which also contributes to inflation. And, remember, this is a global issue, not exclusively an American one.
Yes, unemployment is low, but, as yours truly has been saying for years, it’s not a true indication of people out of work. Many of those people who were unemployed had expended their unemployment money, especially in those Trump Party states that believed that those folks are just “lazy” and cut extended benefits faster than Leatherface’s chainsaw. Single mothers who could not get child-care because of the pandemic can’t exactly go back into the workforce if they have no way to take care of those kids.
There’s also the matter of job openings versus people actually being hired. Just because a company has a job opening posted doesn’t mean they will actually hire someone for that position. Either the wages they offer are not acceptable (i.e. below poverty levels), the working conditions are too toxic (we are still in a global pandemic, you know), or the company really isn’t hiring people right now and are making do with their current staff.
How do I know this? Because we’ve all been here before, back when President Joe Biden was Vice-President Joe Biden.
Biden was Vice-President during the Great Recession, when the economy supposedly was “gangbusters” after they bailed out the “Too Big to Fail” banks. Not one of the corporate criminals aside from Bernie Madoff that screwed over the hard-working Americans were ever charged for their crimes. We were told that the economy would go through a so-called “jobless recovery”, and Biden and the rest of the Executive Branch were a-okay with that.
So, yeah, everything was fine then just as long as the banks were making profits and Big Corporate were making profits and Big Medical and Big Pharma were making profits. But the rest of us? The ones forsaken by the White House and all the “Bigs”? No, it didn’t seem like the economy was doing so great for us. And that’s why a lot of the forsaken Americans who previously voted for Barack Obama twice ended up voting for the Narcissist in 2016.
Let’s get brutally honest here... we will always view the economy through our personal lenses. If you’re a millionaire or a billionaire and you’re making big money from stocks and corporate profits, yeah, you’ll see the economy as going great. But if you’re a hard-working American who has been struggling to make ends meet and you see empty shelves at the store and what you can get costs more and more, yeah, you’re not going to see the economy in a good light, no matter what the indicators say.
No, it’s not all Joe Biden’s fault. Some of it is because of corporate greed. Some of it is because we don’t have enough people vaccinated and/or masked to bring the pandemic infections and hospitalizations and deaths down. Some of it is because we don’t have the supply chain problem under control yet. But President Biden and his folks need to see the economy from our perspective, not just the perspectives of the people with all the money. They need to learn the lesson they failed to learn the last time around, otherwise the hysterical hypocrites from the party of the orange-skinned narcissist will have us all convinced that the economy is crashing instead of climbing.
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