OPINION:
The Democratic presidential nominee — whether President Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris — will be haunted by a simple question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
The answer is an emphatic no for just about everyone who isn’t being paid to host a talk show on MSNBC. The rest of us feel something’s not quite right, as was confirmed in Wednesday’s report from the Atlanta Federal Reserve.
The number-crunchers say economic growth, as measured by gross domestic product, underperformed expectations at a lackluster 1.5% for the quarter. GDP is stalling because manufacturing is weak and people are spending less. Americans can’t afford to splurge.
“While real wage growth has turned slightly positive in recent months,” the Fed economists explained, “the level of real wages is still below where they were at the onset of the inflation surge that we began to see in the first quarter of 2021.”
Notably, 2021 is when Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris took over the White House. A year later, supermarket prices spiked 11.4% — the highest level of food inflation since the dark days of Jimmy Carter. The Agriculture Department says prices have increased only 2.1% so far this year, which is an improvement, but ordinary items are still pricier than they should be.
This didn’t happen under former President Donald Trump. When he was in charge, overall inflation was 5%, compared with 19.3% via the Democrats promoting the triple whammy of higher spending, higher debt and higher taxes.
The administration’s 2025 budget will extract an extra $5.3 trillion from taxpayers over the next decade. The Tax Foundation estimates the chilling effect on economic output will lower GDP by 1.6% and wages by 1.1%, and 666,000 jobs will be snuffed out.
Thanks to Mr. Biden’s flurry of executive orders, industrious Americans who didn’t go to college will have the privilege of paying hundreds of billions of dollars to cover the loans of those who did. They’ll also be paying billions to cover the medical bills of lawbreakers who aren’t even Americans. They’ll pay billions for a massive welfare expansion for able-bodied people who prefer a more leisurely lifestyle.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget conveniently omitted the cost of these orders and the cost of interest when it fabricated a debate talking point for Mr. Biden, who said Mr. Trump had added more to the national debt.
Mr. Trump’s net expenditures — bloated unnecessarily by the reckless COVID-19 spending splurge — were still several trillion less than under Mr. Biden when comparing like-to-like.
Even the pandemic’s devastating economic effects couldn’t dampen the public’s mood with a competent businessman at the helm. The University of Michigan’s consumer confidence measure averaged 96.5 during the former president’s term, while it’s just 68.4 under the the Biden-Harris duo.
The White House isn’t without positive news. Wall Street investors expect interest rates to drop in September, so the administration is temporarily cheered by the markets reaching all-time highs — on paper. S&P growth under Mr. Trump was still more than double what it is under Mr. Biden, in inflation-adjusted terms.
Voters can and will judge for themselves how they fared under each administration. And that’s making Democrats very nervous.
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