TNR’s Michael Tomasky with the word:
I’m going to tell you something that I’m pretty sure you don’t know—and that you probably won’t even believe. Ready? Real wages are now growing in the United States at a pace faster than the spike in the cost of living since the pandemic. More than that: For the first time in decades, wage growth is consistently stronger in the middle and at the bottom than at the top.
See, I told you that you wouldn’t believe it. But it’s right there in a recent study by David Autor, Arindrajit Dube, and Annie McGrew, three well-known economists. Dube just wrote up the results at Project Syndicate, emphasizing: “Importantly, the real wages of the middle quintile are not only higher today than they were before the pandemic, but slightly higher than we would expect based on 2015-19 trends. In other words, the typical American worker’s purchasing power has grown at least as much as it likely would have in the absence of the global challenges posed by the pandemic and geopolitical conflicts.”
If you’re waiting to see this reported in the mainstream media, except by me and my colleague Tim Noah and a small handful of other people, I advise you to stop. It’s not going to happen. In the mainstream media, there’s still largely one Joe Biden–era economic story: inflation, gas prices, people feeling worse off than they did four years ago, and ooh, did he just forget someone’s name again?
He goes on to make the point that, yes, people are affected by higher gas prices and you can’t tell people to feel better about something they genuinely don’t feel better about, which is true. But it’s also important to note, as Paul Krugman has been doing relentlessly, that according to the consumer satisfaction surveys, when people are asked if their own personal finances are good, a large majority says yes, when asked if the national economy is good a large majority says no which indicates that this isn’t about most people feeling the strain in their own lives it’s about what they hear about the national economy which is an abstraction that they’re getting from the media narrative.
He also brings up the fact that the “are you better off than you were four years ago” ploy is ridiculous and that Biden is already hitting that hard in a new ad:
There are two issues the Biden campaign needs to stress going forward. The first is the one raised by this new ad—how much is to be gained politically by reminding the American people of Trump’s hideous handling of the outbreak. I think at this point it’s hard to say. People remember nothing. They probably think it wasn’t Trump’s fault, and he did OK. It’s true that it wasn’t his fault, and let’s remember that he did lay out the money for Operation Warp Speed.
But he did a lot of things wrong, including lying to the American people about the virus’s severity and standing up there at those nightly press conferences making a total ass of himself. A few hundred thousand people died who didn’t have to die. It’s essential to remind voters of that, to tell that narrative. He was a disaster and an embarrassment.
The second issue is the broader comparison of the two economies. Trump’s pre-pandemic economy, as I’ve written before, was good. Trump haters can’t deny it. It wasn’t because of anything he did. He passed a tax cut for the rich. It goosed demand a little, and it did help the stock market. Median household income rose dramatically in one year, from 2018 to 2019.
But it was not the greatest economy in the history of the universe. Trump’s jobs numbers in his first two years lagged behind Barack Obama’s in his last two, 4.5 million to 5.2 million. And both are way behind Biden’s first two-year total of nearly 11 million. And wages, as I noted above, are up. And they’re especially up for the middle class and the poor. This is what “middle-out economics” means.
Granted, Democrats have to be careful how they talk about all this. But they have to find a way, and it has to be completely free of the backtracking and apologetics Democrats so often display. Jobs are up. Wages are up. The stock market is way up. Inequality is down. The deficit is down. Big laws passed under Biden are opening factories and putting people to work. It’s all true.
You don’t have to let Trump’s lies stand just because you don’t want to be insensitive to those people who are having a rough time. In fact, it would be political malpractice to do it. He floated on the good economy he inherited from Obama until disaster hit and then he screwed everything up with a disastrous pandemic response. And his entire term was constant, overwhelming chaos. On the other hand, as Tomasky writes:
Biden inherited a horrible economy, got us out of that crisis, suffered through a price crisis that also affected the rest of the developed world, but is now presiding over the greatest monthly job growth in history (yes, at 289,000 a month) and is keeping his core campaign promise of shifting wealth from the top to the middle and the bottom. Why is it so hard to tell that story, Democrats?
It is not difficult.