by Issues & Insights Editorial Board at Issues & Insights
When he wasn’t admiring his White House portrait, Barack Obama managed to say a nice thing about President Joe Biden. He must have been joking, though, because what he said defies reality.
“Joe, it is now America’s good fortune to have you as president,” Obama said. “The country is better off than when you took office. We should all be deeply grateful for that.”
Our “good fortune”? Let’s review just how much “better off” we all are thanks to Biden and his fellow Democrats.
COVID deaths: When Biden took office on the promise that he had a plan that would end COVID, the official death count was 424,318. Today it is over 1.044 million. In other words, there have been nearly 620,000 COVID deaths on Biden’s watch. And that’s despite all the interventions Biden claimed would end the pandemic. Are the families of those 620,000 people better off?
Inflation: Despite the recent decline in pump prices, gasoline costs 91% more than it did on January 2021, according to the Consumer Price Index. Food prices are up 14%. Overall prices have climbed 13% in the time Biden has been president. To put that last number in perspective, the overall increase in the CPI during President Donald Trump’s entire four years in office was just 7%.
Real earnings: How about workers, are they better off? While wages have climbed, they haven’t nearly kept pace with Bidenflation. As a result, workers have seen their real wages decline by 5%, which works out to an effective average pay cut of $2,726 a year. Does that, in Obama’s mind, make them better off?
Financial stress: Inflation and a sluggish economy…
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