The Economy Is In Surprisingly Good Shape. Why Doesn't Anyone Know About It?
Biden has a jobs record any president would kill for and Covid numbers are down, but the press refuses to talk about it. Here's why.
by Justin Rosario
The economy is, well, not quite roaring, but it’s straining at the Covid chains holding it back and the chains are starting to snap, one by one. Even with those chains in place, we are in the middle of an economic recovery unmatched in over half a century. More so because it does not rely on an artificial bubble like real estate or magical dot com fairy tales.
Unemployment is down, wages are up, the stock market (still regarded as a measure of the economy even though it is not) is up. But no one really seems to be aware of what is going on which suggests there is a concerted effort to downplay the news.
Now why would that be the case? I have a few ideas on that. But first, an update.
Where Are We Now?
A few months ago, the economy was not bad, but not nearly as great as it should have been. August and September’s job reports were pretty weak. The supply chain snags were getting worse. Delta was still running rampant.
Today, August and September’s reports have been revised upward by 235,000 jobs, putting them on par or significantly ahead of the average over the last decade. October came in at a strong 531,000 jobs, blowing past expectations by over 100,000. Unemployment dropped to 4.6% despite the ongoing Great Resignation. Jobless claims are down to the lowest point since the pandemic started and are almost in line with historical norms. But wait! There’s more!
Covid is on the brink of getting beaten back. There is a vaccine available for children aged 5-11 and parents are rushing out to get their kids protected with little of the resistance from the right I predicted. Schools will, soon or later, be mandating Covid vaccines all over the country and it will not matter how loudly Republicans scream about it. Biden’s vaccine mandate for large employers is being temporarily held up in the courts but companies are going to keep doing it anyway because it’s good business. Finally, Pfizer has a pill that can keep you from getting seriously ill if you contract Covid, meaning that the people who cannot (or will not) get vaccinated or have a rare breakthrough infection, will no longer be at the mercy of the virus.
Barring a new variant that evades vaccines, all of that spells the end of Covid in the United States which will allow us to turn our attention to vaccinating the rest of the world. Or, at least as much as our extremely xenophobic country is capable of doing so.
So why don’t people seem to be aware of this? Sure, I write about the news for a living so I consume far more than the average person. Even so, this stuff is not exactly obscure information and it certainly is not minor news. Not all of it is page one screaming headline worthy but it is far from unimportant. This is where we are but that is not where people see us.
Media Infallibility
Roughly ten seconds after President Biden was sworn into office, the media began prepping for a new narrative that his presidency had failed.
I am exaggerating of course, but not by much.
Before the Delta surge, the press lost all interest in discussing Biden’s actions to flood the country with vaccine shots, bringing Covid (temporarily) to its knees. They did not discuss Republicans efforts to deliberately kept the Delta surge going, instead blaming Biden for not “convincing” the growing anti-vaxx movement being fueled by the GOP (one suspects that as soon as Covid is on the run, again, the press will again forget how that happened)
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As for the economy, for a president who is “failing”, Biden has a jobs record any president would kill for:
But that’s just matched against Trump. Let’s take a broader perspective:
Biden has had the best jobs record of the last ten years. If you go back 41 years to 1980, it is even crazier. With the exception of an average April, Biden has ranked among the top four in job creation every month. Mostly, he comes in first or second. That is covering every major recession, recovery, and boom in the last four decades.
This is happening in the middle of the Great Resignation in which hundreds of thousands of people are quitting their jobs or retiring every month. You would expect unemployment to go up and the jobs report to tank under those circumstances. Yet, even with all of that going on, the numbers are exactly what you’d want to see: Companies hiring at a record pace and paying more to boot. There is real competition for workers and workers know it — a true sign of a healthy economy.
There is almost no chance you will hear about this from much of the press. There is talk of the Great Resignation, but no connecting it to the health of the economy. Media infallibility is in full swing now, and it has not gone unnoticed.
In the middle of the afternoon on Friday, news consumers visiting WashingtonPost.com had to scroll down past 75 different stories and links before they found the first mention of the blockbuster jobs report. Ironically, at the top of the Post site Friday afternoon was a column about how the White House is having trouble spreading good news about the economy. Over at CNN.com, readers at the “US” homepage had to scroll past 70 stories before seeing the first jobs headline.
Consider the narrative incessantly pushed by virtually every media outlet until Friday: Biden has not delivered on the economy. His agenda is too far left, threatening to expand the debt and fuel inflation. He has lost the confidence of the public on covid. Biden cannot corral the left (and/or the centrists).
None of that was borne out by subsequent events (or polling on his agenda). By week’s end, the economy looked on much firmer footing — and, unlike his predecessor, the president had achieved a historic infrastructure investment.
I submit that the press is still furious with Biden, and Democrats in general, for being “boring”.
Compared to the Trump and Republican clown show, Democrats are wet towels because they govern like adults. Even the extended work of passing the infrastructure and Build Back Better bills is, ultimately, boring in terms of news. And that was with a massive amount of effort on the part of the press to generate as much dissension and drama as possible. These bills are about bridges, roads, child care, and climate change, none of which is going to land reporters book deals and interviews.
Democrats are not lucrative for the media, and I believe the industry subconsciously resents them for it. Republicans, on the other hand, are money makers. Corrupt, incompetent, rife with sex scandals, the GOP generates headlines on a daily basis. Reporters make their careers when Republicans are in power because Republicans in power cannot stop being criminals and sloppy ones, at that.
All of the incentives are there for the media to undermine Democrats and put Republicans back in power. All of the incentives are there to never admit they were wrong about anything, ever. Why should they? If the press can create the narrative and make it come true, they benefit from that directly. A second Trump presidency would be a massive financial windfall for America’s media.
If you’re in doubt about this, consider how the press flew into an apocalyptic frenzy over Democrats losing Virginia by around 60,000 votes. The party in power losing Virginia is something that has happened after every presidential election since 1980. It was an unfortunate loss but also extremely predictable.
What wasn’t predictable was Democrats winning in New Jersey. The same flip to the opposite party has held true for decades as well and New Jersey does not like to elect Democratic governors twice. But Democratic governor Phil Murphy is heading to a second term in defiance of all historical trends by a margin of around...60,000 votes (so far).
Murphy winning in New Jersey is considered a “narrow” victory and means he has to move to the center. Youngkin’s win has yet to be called narrow by the same media outlets and there has not been a single call for him to move to the center from his far-right anti-abortion, race-baiting, anti-semitic positions. The press doesn’t even talk about Gavin Newsom’s crushing defeat of his Republican challenger just two months ago and they certainly do not talk about whether or not Democrats have a mandate to move left in California. The double standard is so naked it has its own OnlyFans account. Did you even know that Democrats also had a fantastic night in once-deep red Georgia?
Republicans flipped only nine seats. Georgia was and continues to be a main feature in the GOP’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. You’d think Democrats dominating in an off year election in a formerly red state would be big news. But it’s so buried I had difficulty finding anything on it. It doesn’t matter if the seats were city council, tax collector, or dog catcher. I promise you, if Republicans had flipped this many blue seats in a blue state, or even in a red one, it would have been the second largest news item next to Democrats losing Virginia.
It’s important to note that Georgia has 16 electoral votes. Virginia has 13. Guess which state is getting all the attention as a swing state for 2024 and which is being hardly discussed? Democrats winning does not fit the preferred narrative that Democrats are in trouble so what’s happening in Georgia has been disappeared down the memory hole. If the press will not give us the full picture, that only leaves us with one option.
Responsible media
If the press refuses to talk about what is really happening, then I guess we’ll have to do their job for them. Bob Cesca talked about this last week and I don’t disagree with him. But I am more of the “forewarned is forearmed” type. People are being fed a steady diet of lies and half-truths by those with a vested interest in creating a false narrative. If they did not have a vested interest, we wouldn’t see this kind of nonsense:
They also would not allow the lie that schools require an “exorcism” of Critical Race Theory when anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention knows CRT isn’t taught within one hundred yards of a K-12 classroom anywhere in the country. But I promise that Glenn Youngkin is going to “ban” CRT and the press is going to pretend he is a serious politician.
So, yes, we will have to be the ones spreading the good word, as it were. Tell people that Biden’s jobs record is unmatched in the last 40 years. Tell them that wages have gone up faster than at any point since Reagan was in office. Tell them Georgia keeps getting bluer. Tell them that Covid deaths are concentrated among Trump voters while the rest of America is almost free of the virus. Tell them to stop ordering online and shop in a store before the Christmas rush to ease up the supply line crunch. Once they do that, tell them to enjoy their holidays at their leisure. Tell them that Spring is going to be beautiful and Covid free and the economy is going to be vibrant and healthy.
And then tell them that the only way to protect it all is to vote blue next November because otherwise Republicans will set it all on fire while the press hands them the gasoline.
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My favorite quote in the same opinion piece was in the Washington Post which said a close win in Virginia for Mcauliffe meant they were in trouble and a close win for Youngkin was a mandate. Literally heads I win tails you lose.