For those that would like some non-partisan clarity to current economic issues
as you think about voting in a couple of weeks (information from the Congressional Budget Office via the Boston Globe's Teresa Hanafin):
💲 Jobs: More Americans are working than at any time in history: 153 million. The economy now has half a million more jobs than before the pandemic.
The unemployment rate is 3.5 percent, the lowest since 1969.
💲 Wealth: The bottom half of US households have an average real net worth of $67,200, the highest ever. Under Trump, it was just $34,648. (Remember, he gave tax cuts to the wealthy. Biden gave them to the middle and lower class.)
Even those in the 50th to 90th percentile are doing better under Biden: a real net worth of $747,010 vs. $699,530 under Trump.
💲 Income: Real wages are higher than before the pandemic and have outpaced inflation. From February of 2020 to last month, wages for production and non-supervisory workers have risen 15.6 percent, while the Consumer Price Index has risen 14.6 percent. If you look at the Core CPI, which eliminates food and energy prices because they are so volatile, the increase is 11.8 percent. So Americans' purchasing power is greater now than it was in 2019.
💲 The deficit: The annual federal budget deficit is 50 percent lower than last year, and that includes all of the $426 billion in student loan forgiveness. It was $2.8 trillion in fiscal year 2021 and is $1.4 trillion this year, according to CBO estimates.
Income is up and spending is down: Revenues are $850 billion (or 21 percent) higher and spending is $548 billion (or 8 percent) lower.
This continues the historical pattern of Democratic administrations being far more fiscally responsible than spendthrift Republicans. Yet the GOP's screaming about Democratic spending have convinced Americans who don't read or bother to check facts that it's the Democrats who spend like crazy. The opposite is true.
💲 The economy: The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) hit an all-time high of $20 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year and currently is $19.9 trillion (in the second quarter of this year). The Atlanta Fed thinks it will grow 2.8 percent in the third quarter.
In fact, Droney reports that the six key indicators that the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) uses to measure the health of the economy were all up from June to September, and four of them have increased since last December.
💲 Energy independence: The US is on track to produce more crude oil than at any point in the Trump administration: 12.6 million barrels a day vs. 12.3 million in 2019.
💲 Health insurance: Biden revived the Obamacare signup campaigns and advertising that Trump eliminated, and now 92 percent of Americans (and more than 98 percent of kids) have health insurance, an all-time high. Before Obamacare, close to 18 percent of Americans had no health insurance.
Look, there's no doubt that many Americans are worried about the high prices we're all seeing at the grocery store and the gas pump. But one reason inflation has increased is because demand is outpacing supply. Americans are working, earning money, and spending like crazy. Travel is booming, for example. Pent-up demand is getting un-pent.
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