The Joseph Biden administration and liberal media praying for his reelection describe the latest government economic reports at the beginning of April as big improvements for everyone. But working people, whose experiences are quite different, aren’t buying it.
“What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data,” an article in the Never-Trump Wall Street Journal argued April 4, blaming working people for not grasping how things are getting better. After all, the article asserts, “inflation has moved in the right direction” with “unemployment near its lowest in half a century.”
“When it comes to the economy, the vibes are at war with the facts,” asserted the Journal. “The vibes seem symptomatic of a broader pessimism disconnected from the data.”
But their statistics are a scam. This “data” is sharply class divided. The wealthy rulers and their upper-middle-class allies may be doing swell, skewing the government’s “average” wage and job figures, but the working class is not.
Look at David Calhoun, the retiring CEO of Boeing, who has been through a widely publicized rough patch recently. The company decided to give him a big stock bonus as he was on the way out, bringing his 2023 salary to $32.8 million, a big jump from the year before, when he only got $22.6 million.
But for workers, real earnings have declined about $2,000 since 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
And while the 3.2% annual inflation rate in February was slower than a year earlier, prices are still rising, especially on necessities working families have to buy. Prices for hundreds of grocery items have gone up more than 50% since 2019, and they’re not coming down. This affects us every time we go to the supermarket and try to pay our rent or mortgage.
A $100 grocery list in 2019 costs $137 today, another article in the same issue of the Journal admitted. These increases include: eggs, up 63%; sugar, 53%; beef, 51%; fruit snacks, 77%; sandwich bread, 34%; sports drinks, 80%; and more.
New schemes to raise prices
Bosses have been working overtime to come up with other schemes to raise prices and boost profits. There’s “shrinkflation,” where you pay the same price to buy ever-smaller packages of food, like yogurt, breakfast cereal and lots more.
There’s a new scheme promoted by “behavioral economists” called “price partitioning.” It lures you in with a low initial price, which is then followed by high-priced additional items that you have to get to use your new item. For example, you rent a hotel room at a rock-bottom price, only to find out they tack on a bunch of additional fees. Lured by cheap prices for a printer, you end up with having to buy wildly expensive ink cartridges. There are plenty of similar examples.
The simple fact of the matter is the government’s inflation figures are inaccurate. A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the way the consumer price index is calculated today, as compared to the methods used in the 1980s, systematically underestimates the true level of inflation.
One example: “Pre-1983, mortgage costs were in the CPI, as were car payments pre-1998,” Larry Summers, treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, wrote. “Now price indexes do not include borrowing costs.”
Increasing numbers of workers have to depend on their credit cards to cover rising expenses. Interest rates on monthly unpaid balances doubled from 2013 to 2023, to over 20% a year. In addition, some are now outrageously higher, with Lowe’s hitting 31.99%.
“If we measured inflation as we did in the 1970s,” the New York Sun wrote March 29 commenting on the recent study, “the inflation that started in 2021 would have peaked at 18 percent — double its reported peak. That’s higher than the worst of the 1970s and 1980s. Inflation’s current annual rate would be about 8 percent.”
The Labor Department announced that 303,000 jobs were added in March. But nearly three-quarters were in lower-paid or part-time work in hotels, restaurants, health care and low-level government jobs. Better jobs, like in manufacturing, contracted for the sixth straight month in March.
Bosses lay off workers
A growing number of plants, including John Deere & Co., Whirlpool and 3M, are laying off workers. Tyson Foods in March said it was closing its pork-packing plant in Perry, Iowa, eliminating over 1,200 jobs. John Deere announced it was booting out 150 workers at its factory in nearby Ankeny.
Bosses at many other factories are cutting back or have frozen hiring, looking to cut their workforce through attrition. Their goal is to increase profits through speeding up production on the backs of the remaining workers. In February factory work fell to a record low 8.2% of jobs in the U.S.
Since late 2022 factories have accounted on average for less than 1% of all jobs added each month.
There’s a growing number of other companies that have announced job cuts this year. This includes UPS, with plans to cut 12,000 jobs; Stellantis, 400 jobs; Amazon and Google are each laying off hundreds of workers; Macy’s, 2,350 job cuts; Sony, 900 workers to be laid off; Microsoft, 1,900; PayPal, 2,000; Expedia, about 1,500 people; and the list goes on.
In California a new state law raised wages of fast-food workers in April to $20 an hour. In response, bosses, particularly at pizza joints, began laying off workers and reducing hours for those left. Over 725,000 workers in California had been employed in fast food.