"Progressive" Democrats campaign off the horrors of Genocide Joe’s "good economy"
Biden’s domestic policy record is terrible. It ain't you. It's him
Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote a piece in which he valiantly declared “I have been telling people the economy is good, based on the data, and I intend to continue to do so, despite the marching orders from the Washington Post”.
Baker’s premise is that if most people were willing to say the economy was good in 2019 then corporate media manipulation must be the main reason they would not be willing to say so in 2024: “If 2019 was a good economy, then can we also say the economy is good today?”
Low unemployment doesn’t pack the punch it did in 1960s
He leans heavily on unemployment rate data to make his case
The story of the unemployment rate is incredibly good. We have had 27 consecutive months of below 4.0 percent unemployment. That streak matches the run in the 1960s boom and exceeds any stretch in the last half century.[my emphasis]
Unemployment is a really huge deal for the simple reason that in an economy where most people get the bulk of their income from working, not being able to get a job means you’re really screwed. But that is only the beginning of the story.
When the unemployment rate is low workers have more bargaining power. This means that workers can push for higher wages.
But the correlation between unemployment and worker bargaining power is not the same today as it was in the 1960s. You can see that in the data for unionization, which Baker conceded to me on Twitter, has not budged since 2019. In the 1960s, the unionization rate was over 30%. Today it hovers around 11%.
SOURCE: CEPR
Biden has kept unions down
As one of Baker’s colleagues at CEPR pointed out “Unions’ favorability rating among the American public reached the highest level since 1965. The highest approval was found among workers under the age of 35, with over 77 percent of those in this age group expressing positive views toward labor unions. Yet in 2021, less than 10 percent of workers in this age group were union members”
US workers want unions but, despite very low unemployment, have not had the power to get them. Biden has not just quietly kept in place a whole slew of laws (and blatant non-enforcement of laws) that keep unionization low. Biden has also boldly intervened to weaken unions. As Baker’s CEPR colleagues put it in December of 2022 “both Congress and the Biden administration opted to impose an agreement that the rank-and-file of four railroad unions, including the largest railroad union, had rejected.”
To drive down anger at Biden’s domestic policy record you have to drive down workers’ expectations. There is not a strong case here for the media tricking workers into being overly harsh assessing their conditions under Biden - not unless you think “Vote Biden! He’ll keep unions down” was his campaign slogan in 2020.
Exaggerated disconnect between public views of personal finances versus the economy
Baker gives many powerful examples of the media successfully misinforming people about the economy. But he cautions that “No one is telling anyone that they personally are wrong about their own economic situation and that this is actually good, even though they think it is bad. The polls tell us that most people actually feel pretty good about their own economic situation. The problem is that people think their own situation is an exception and that everyone else is doing poorly.” [1]
But the poll Baker cites exaggerates the disconnect between how people view their own finances compared to the economy. The percentage of people saying they are “doing at least ok” personally has held very steady since 2017. Meanwhile the percentage saying the national economy is “good or excellent” has fallen drastically since 2019. That is not a like to like comparison: “doing at least ok” is not the same as “good or excellent”.
Consider the results (below) of this poll by Pew. It shows that the percentage describing their personal finances aso “good/excellent” has also fallen significantly since 2019, although by much less than the percentage who use the same terms to describe the economy: 57% said economy was “good/excellent” as of 2019, only 23% in 2023; 50% described their personal finances in those terms in 2019 compared to only 41% in 2024.
“Progressive” Democrats campaign off horrors of the “good economy”
Fake “progressives” like Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders must constantly tell people about the horrific outcomes in the US economy. It is not just corporate media telling them things are bad under Biden. The dysfunctional message from within Biden’s own party is, effectively, “Look at all these terrible problems we Democrats haven’t solved. Vote for us again”. The Democratic Party is not some upstart party that’s never been in power. It is best described as one faction of the nazified ruling party, the other faction being the Republicans.
Lastly, Biden is hardly well positioned to scold people about Republicans being even worse than he is. Democrats have never been willing to stop publicly showering Republicans with affection.
NOTE
[1] The media can actually get people to think their personal financial situation is worse than it is. I recently heard a manager describe himself as “lower middle class” even though he makes at least double what the median income income is for an entire household in my province. When I pointed out the data to him he was genuinely stunned. When your understanding of the world comes from what you glean from casual consumption of establishment media, of course you can be totally manipulated, even about your own finances. Nevertheless, it is more difficult to mislead people about things that they experience everyday for themselves, like the state of their own finances and work conditions.