The world’s best recovery and a silent revolution
In an economics column headlined, “Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery,” David Lynch (no, not that one) writes in the Washington Post:
Here, despite lingering consumer angst over inflation, the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners.
Since 2020, the United States has powered through a once-in-a-century pandemic, the highest inflation in 40 years and fallout from two foreign wars. Now, after posting faster annual growth last year than in 2022, the U.S. economy is quashing fears of a new recession while offering lessons for future crisis-fighting.
“The U.S. has really come out of this into a place of strength and is moving forward like covid never happened,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist who now runs an eponymous consulting firm. “We earned this; it wasn’t just a fluke.”
It was no accident:
On Friday, President Biden hailed fresh government data showing that annual inflation over the second half of 2023 fell back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. Coupled with Thursday’s news that the economy grew by 3.1 percent over the past 12 months, the Commerce Department report showed that the United States appears to have achieved an economic soft landing.
Former labor secretary Robert Reich hasn’t seen anything like it. Biden is moving the country toward “a more equitable economy”:
Biden is on the stump reminding Americans of the mess he inherited and the lemonade he made from Trump lemons.
“Just think back to the mess Donald Trump left this country in. A deadly pandemic, economic free fall, a violent insurrection,” Biden reminded voters in South Carolina.