According to CNN, “The U.S. economy has now regained all jobs lost during the pandemic, after a blowout July jobs report that showed a gain of 528,000 jobs, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The massive monthly gain was more than double the 250,000 that economists were expecting, according to Refinitiv. The unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5% after holding at 3.6% for the past four months. The July jobless rate matched the half-century low last seen in February 2020.”
Clearly, Biden has led us into the worst economic crisis the U.S. has ever witnessed! But of course! This is what a recession looks like: Jobs continue to grow, and unemployment hits a 50-year low. But gas prices! This is why we have professionals who officially define when a recession begins and ends, for if we left it to the general dumbassery of citizens, then we’d always be in a recession because the average idiot American is never happy with the economy. If the economy slows, they’re out of a job and can’t pay for anything. If the economy is on fire, then they have work but still can’t pay for anything because inflation is characteristic of an overheated economy. I assert that people really are in the same situation, if not better, as they were during “normal” economic growth. Allow me to explain.
So, as shown in the above chart, I dived into my FactSet to pull two pieces of familiar information for comparison. (I know it’s small, but you can chart this information yourself — it’s all public information.) The consumer price index (CPI) and wage growth are two data points the MSM and economists love to compare side by side, so I will, too, but over 15 years, not year over year or month over month. The solid green line represents total CPI, and you can see the current sharp increase to the right, which tops out at 9 percent. That number has been all over the news — ad nauseam. The solid blue line is nominal wage (average hourly earnings) growth. Again, you can see the peak to the right, around 6 percent. This, too, should be another familiar number reported in the news. The two dotted straight lines are trendlines (via linear regression) over the entire span of 15 years — admittedly, this is an arbitrary time selection. In short, the trendlines indicate the gap between inflation and wage growth. For the last 15 years, inflation outpaced wage growth by about 1 to 2 percentage points. (For comparison, a 30-year time frame yielded nearly parallel trendlines separate by 1.5 percentage points.) In fact, the trendline gap shrinks considerably in 2021 and 2022. It has only been since March 2022 that the gap between the two solid lines diverged to a degree greater than historic norms. What does all this mean? Except for the last couple of months, one may argue that people are struggling no more or no less than what they have been for the previous 15 years (or 30 years) when it comes to their income keeping up with inflation.
For some reason, Americans seem to think the entire economy has fallen off a cliff for over a year now despite more job creation and wage growth lagging inflation by margins no worse than what almost all working people have experienced in the last 15 or 30 years. It is a matter of perspective, and people have no perspective or memory beyond what they ate for breakfast. As usual, idiots judge the economy more by feelings and emotions than facts and figures. As I have said countless times already, morons or America think they understand the economy by looking at gas prices. The populace piles on when the MSM laments a few poor economic indicators. Suddenly, that 25 cents extra for a pound of chicken feels like a burden and eats away at every last dollar of a paycheck, and it’s all Biden’s fault. It’s a no-win situation for him because America — stupid!