"Bidenomics boom" = USA go BUST

The real-world economy is already imploding, contrary to fake narratives

Famously, Reagan asked the people if they felt they were “better off than 4 years ago”, and won big. Also, in Bill Clinton’s campaign war room, the messaging got whittled down to and entirely focused on “It’s the economy, stupid”. He won, too.

People need and want material security, a good life for themselves and their families (and communities). They want freedom (as the Bill of Rights is supposed to guarantee) and be safe from crime, too … these being core issues for the populist movement and in Donald J. Trump’s rally speeches. Alongside free and fair elections, equal rule of law and obviously the border crisis. With the migrant-invasion of millions contributing to unprecedented crime rates, more election shenanigans and to the economic distress of the working / middle classes. »»» The issues are interconnected.

The corrupt globalist regime in the WH … all over the federal government, and its allies in the “Democrat” political eco system … try to convince the people that under their rule, the economy is doing just fine, and increasingly so, thanks to their policies: in terms both of GDP (gross domestic product) and supposedly great employment numbers. And with a slowing down inflation, they claim, there’s no need to be worried about that issue any longer.

This last, and ludicrous, lie is easy to expose: inflation is “cumulative” … once it has driven prices up, the prices remain on that higher level of unaffordability, as the new ground plateau for what’s coming next. When consumer products have gone up like 20 percent over little more than 3 years, and many basic products (food!) or services much more than that, every dollar you earn (or get as fixed income) will buy you one sixth less than before, or a quarter less. This damage that inflation has done to you will stay, unless you can compensate higher prices with equally higher wages, but such big wage rises need a booming economy in general, which doesn’t exist currently in the US for a vast majority of the people.

So now to the jobs (and the economy in general). You don’t need a PhD in something in order to research it. Yes, many people shy away from dealing with large, abstract numbers and “mathematical” challenges; also, a little training might help to understand how statistics work, or don’t work, and how the numbers can be abused for lies, even if the numbers in itself are basically factual. Anyway, it’s not rocket science and we’ll just dive in.

Focus on the workers, and tracking them

The main issue for a working-age adult economically is: do I get / keep a decent job, full-time, with an appropriate salary? Cue employment numbers / statistics.

There are several ways of counting such numbers. Some basic methodological background (skip it, but AYOR):

• One can either look at (bureaucratically deal with) employers who are reporting payroll numbers (e.g. for taxation purposes), or simply track households and ask the people, and the latter way of keeping score is way more reliable. (It focuses on actual persons, too … not the jobs, of which a person can have / need several.)

• The resulting numbers though keep fluctuating throughout the year: because e.g. in the middle of winter, there will be less building activity. Or take touristic hot spots, where the business is in high gear during summer, the rest of the year: not so much.

• That’s why the statisticians try to filter the seasonal influences / variation out, in order to show the big underlying trend. That’s not illegitimate per se, but it does open the door to politically motivated manipulation: How can you say exactly how many people would have full-time jobs if only it were spring already, not still winter? You simply can’t.

• What the Biden regime currently does with their super-duper job market numbers is a combination: wantonly over-estimating the jobs that WOULD (hypothetically!) exist without seasonal variation, and then also cranking the preliminary raw numbers up on the fly … since it takes a little time for the statisticians to sort everything out until numbers are settled. (It’s not rocket science still, but to get everything bureaucratically flawless isn’t trivial either. When months later, the official numbers, as opposed to the manipulated preliminary estimates, get put down on paper, it’s long out of the news cycle.)

When you’re born in the USA …

Now do let’s have a look at actual job numbers, nationally, based on household survey and without adjustments for season. Of course, we are not going to compare numbers from June of one year to January of another. We’ll stick with January, so we basically don’t have to deal with the seasonal variation in the first place.

The numbers are easily available from the Federal Reserve Bank. Specifically, these numbers come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the federal government. Here’s a first graph directly from the Fed’s website:

Look at the highlighted data point from Jan. 2020, before the China virus came in during Trump’s 1st term in the WH: Over 129 million full-time jobs. Compare that to the latest number in the upper left corner, for Jan. 2024: Now it’s a bit over 2 million jobs more, 4 years later. Not too bad, it seems. But wait, here’s a closer look … focused on workers born in the US, which excludes (recent) immigrants:

Attention, this is not just full-time jobs now, but including people working on part-time jobs … while excluding the foreigners / immigrants. The numbers are almost on the same level as all full-time jobs: nearly 130 million workers. But now, the old number from 2020 is HIGHER than the current number 4 years later, with a margin of 120,000. Jobs have been lost!

Only with foreigners, there’s a rise in employment, from a bit over 27 millions in 2020 to almost 30 in 2024. Now, you might consider it good in principle when new residents who have come from the outside, at whatever point in time, can now support themselves through work and don’t need welfare on taxpayer’s dime.

But is it some big success for which the current administration deserves applause? Not at all. The uptick in employment (and much of it part-time only) ain’t really spectacular anyway, but more importantly: the number of people in the country has risen in parallel, and much more than the employment.

For that, we’ll use numbers from the Census bureau. You can delve into their spread sheets, or you can rely on my extract. We’ll take a metric called “household population”, that would roughly be normal people potentially living right across the street in a high riser or a town house, a suburban bungalow or a trailer park in the middle of nowhere. Not prisoners, not military personnel.

Here are the official numbers, for the 1st of December of each year (the numbers since August 2023 are not yet empirical numbers, but educated guesses called “projections”):

You see: from the turn of 2020/21 to right now, there are over FIVE million more people living in the country. From not even 324 millions back then, the government says there are now beyond 329 millions. So far, this is the general picture:

While the number of people living in the country
has gone up over 4 years by more than FIVE millions

(officially, according to the federal government!),

the number of employed foreigners

(including with only insufficient or even negligible part-time pseudo jobs)

has risen only at half that number over the same period of time,

while employment for US-born workers has even gone slightly down.

Even when we acknowledge that a portion of the added people are not working-age adults: How is that a stunning political achievement, even just from an economic perspective (leaving aside immigration problems), let alone some kind of a boom?

Shallow asinine self-aggrandizing

The clowns purporting to bring you the good Bidenomics news don’t find it beneath themselves to prance around like the greatest wizards since sliced bread was invented just for getting employment back to just about where it was before the China virus came in, plus a portion of added immigrants actually going to work.

But that “back to normal” didn’t need special wizardry, it only requested putting an end to the lockdowns that for many, many people in the blue states went on endlessly, thus slowing down the economic recovery. It’s not a proof of economic competence with the Biden regime. Yet … if that’s how they want to play the game, why not. Let’s do it and look again at the curve of full time workers as the core metric:

As we’ve seen in the first of these graphs further up, the current number for this metric is above 131 millions, which means that under Biden’s rule … starting with his inauguration in Jan 2021 … the number has gone up, from almost 124 millions, by another less than 8 millions; divide that through 3 years = 36 months, and the average gain of full-time workers is roughly 220k per month.

In the last mere 9 months of Trump in the WH though, in comparison, the same metric went up roughly 10 millions (and against the seasonal trend, too), which results in a statistical average of more than a million per month. Now who’s the winner in THIS kind of absurd game?

Actually, btw, it is indeed a merit of Trump to insist on ending the lockdowns very soon after they were initiated and to bring the economy back forcefully. — If you think a Democrat in the WH would have acted even remotely comparable, I have a couple very fine bridges to sell you, some even of Roman Era origin. — The rapid recovery starting with May of 2020 already (!) was not preordained, it was something that #45 actively worked for, and against much of the mainstream narrative pushed by the hysteric legacy media.

Winning through cheating … sounds familiar?

Our analysis is only starting here because now we need a reasonable assessment of exactly how the employment came roughly back to where it already was 4 years ago.

That recovery in itself … looked at in isolation … is FAR from being some spectacular achievement … again: that’s barely back to the previous status quo setting the standard, or “normal”. (Not the WEF-type dystopian “new normal”, with “build back better”, supposedly. Or is it? Spoiler alert: yes, it is, largely.)

But since a) the WH claims responsibility and keeps gratulating themselves for it and b) we need to look at the whole picture, if we want to really understand in the first place … we have to acknowledge that there is no such thing as “in itself”, as if the economy was left to its own devices and politics mostly just watched curiously, or even as if it was an isolated sphere of “labor market politics”.

It’s much, much worse. The government has abandoned free market capitalism and pursues quasi socialist policy patterns (as with the “green new deal” schemes); the job market is no longer a top priority to begin with, instead at best a secondary issue that unluckily needs to be dealt with, because voters do care about it.

Deal with the situation they did, and then some. How? Well, this … roughly speaking, in terms of job workers numbers … full recovery over a nearly 4-year-cycle came about only at a huge price, and you can take “price” literally.

President Trump had the economy prosper by unleashing domestic business dynamics: with de-regulation, incentives (for black minority areas), lower taxes, providing for fair international trade conditions and abundant affordable energy.

Biden’s team changed course radically, not least with their war on domestic energy, which fueled rampant inflation. At the same time, they — until 2022 with all of Congress under “Democrat” control, since early 2023 hardly challenged by the House majority GOP — massively pushed the economy with endless money and all kinds of crazy government spending on their pet policy fields.

Yeah, you have heard about the spending already. Not good either. 
I know. But … surprise … we need to C-O-N-N-E-C-T the economy and the money, analytically. Which somehow doesn’t seem to get done, as far as I’m aware of the public debate. 

Whether the money went into “stimulus” measures practically throwing (“helicopter”) money into the population, or unemployment benefits, or subsidies, or welfare … we don’t need to delve into the details. The big piece of news is that federal government spending levels are now nearly one half (!) above where they were previous to the China virus.

• The real need for bridging the lockdown-induced money / income gap arose in 2020 and it should ideally have ended there. Even when we generously concede that there was continuing need for Keynesian measures into 2021 … we are now three years later, and the spending spree continues unabated.

• The federal deficit is now annually spiking towards 2 TRILLION dollars. The speed at which the government accumulates not wealth, but crippling debt, is breakneck.

• Of course, the deficit and debt situation is indeed a huge problem “in itself”, but the main focus of our analysis is the “success” of Bidenomics.

• One trillion, that is one million, times one million. Imagine a city with a million households (think Houston TX or Chicago IL!), and each one of them has a million bucks to spend within a year, that would move one trillion dollars.

So if the government doesn’t only do what it did, roughly, until 2019, but is now spending so much more … borrowed money … on top of if, how does that relate to economic growth and employment? Let’s do a tiny little detour in order to develop a reasonable assessment. Look at this graph:

It happens to clearly illustrate how … when inflation does get accounted for, and presumably not too strongly … the economic outlook for a typical middle-class household is deteriorating under Biden, and there’s not even a number for 2023 yet.

But what we were actually looking for is the ballpark number: somewhere between 70 and 80 thousand bucks a year, and that will in most households not come from just one earner. With this background, it seems fair to presume that with an additional government spending of 100k, at least one full-time job must get fiscally induced, and that includes retirement plans and health care on top of the net pay that translates directly into household income.

This is a very benevolent assumption. Because in the real world, there ought to be a lot of jobs that couldn’t be profitably offered / organized from the employer’s perspective, considering wages (and other costs) vs. selling prices, but with some subsidies, one way or the other, it could be done. So ideally, an additional job might be triggered with government spending that accounts for maybe 20% of the employer’s costs. (Whether or not such schemes and programs are sensible economic policies, is a different question entirely.)

But even when the economic impulse comes from diffuse give-away-money, for plain consumption: For every 100k dollars that get circulation in the general population, the people buy stuff or services, which need to get produced additionally by actual working people. Yes, there may be some portion of the money that goes into imported products, but even for them, when regular Joe goes to Walmart and buys stuff manufactured in China, a large portion stays in the country. When you buy an iPhone for 900, it’s not like the Chinese factory workers get 800 of that. (Old story here.)

Get ready for astounding numbers

Now with these mechanisms and numerical relations in mind, let’s go back to just 1 trillion of additional annual government spending. When with 100k, one full-time job ought to get triggered, at least, how much do we get for one million times one million?

Obviously, ten million … 10,000,000. Yes, that is just a very rough playing with numbers. But reasonable, to create a plausible scenario. One, admittedly hypothetical, scenario would be that the current administration, with their crazy spending spree, ought to have created 10 million more full-time jobs, beyond the additional jobs done by additional population from abroad. Which didn’t happen though.

Maybe, there ain’t no reserve of 10 million working-age, useful, educated adults who could even fill that many additional job slots. But then where did the money go? Which leads us to the alternative scenario / perspective: what if the additional Trillion hypothetically didn’t get spent by the government?

Looks like in that case, they wouldn’t even have brought back the 8 million jobs of the recovery since Jan. 2021. And … actually … NONE of them. Which seems impossible, right? WAIT, it gets worse: with actually close to TWO trillions of more spending — compared to before the China virus came in —, there are many millions of jobs on top that appear to be barely held on to, while precariously dangling from an economic cliff that is caused by utterly incompetent / destructive policies.

In other words, the money somehow keeps jobs (working folks numbers) in existence, and so many of them,

even when estimated — in this perspective VERY benevolently (for the Biden WH) — at only 1 job per 100k and year, that without the additional spending, there would now be … [gasp] … get ready for it …

FAR less workers employed than even during peak disruption of the 2020 lockdowns.

There is no way to avoid that logical conclusion, in principle, beyond some bickering over the precise numbers. Or they would have to claim that the additional government spending has nothing to do with employment numbers, but how would that be possible?

Sure, when they give billions to foreign nations, the money is gone and doesn’t help much at home, but then again, they try selling (politically) e.g. the money going to Ukraine by suggesting that much of the money actually returns rapidly, in favor of more US military manufacturing. In that case, it does translate into securing domestic jobs. (And into massive kickbacks, obviously.)

Or they hire people directly, into the government, e.g. tens of thousands additional employees for the IRS. That does drive job numbers up, obviously. It doesn’t make the nation a better place, but it does feed the additional bureaucrats.

So there’s analytically really just one way to go:

This government is actually debilitating the domestic economy, massively, to the tune of probably tens of millions of jobs.

Only with a crazy unsustainable spending spree, based on exploding debts, they merely managed to still get employment back to where it was with Trump.

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Let’s burn the money, baby

Doesn’t end here yet either. It’s not just the job situation that is only not much worse on the face of it due to the crazy government spending. The same goes for the general economic performance as measured in “gross domestic product”. The parallel is not a surprise or coincidence, because basically, employment / wages and GDP depend on each other, and I don’t mean in terms of cause and effect, but in terms of close statistical relation:

GDP … at its core … is nothing but the general sum of whatever gets produced, in terms of goods or services, within the country, and nothing gets produced without people getting paid for it at the work place. GDP can go up when more people work, or when the same number of people produce stuff that sells at higher prices.

So what is true for the pathetic, disturbing relation between job market and additional government spending is – unavoidably – equally true when it comes to the GDP numbers about which the Bidenomics snake oil propagandists are so enthused.

You can be dumber than the average village idiot and still generate GDP by “printing” fresh dollars, thus driving inflation, or borrowing them from China and getting them out into the economy. It’s about as difficult an effect to achieve as kicking a bucket of water or spilling beans all over the kitchen floor.

And then, the incompetent corrupt fools in the current administration are actually able to mess even that up, it seems.

Because according to recent numbers, for each additional dollar of debt that goes into the crazy spending spree, they get far less of additional GDP, statistically. That is like pouring one gallon of gasoline into your car, but the car tells you that only a portion of it is now in the tank. Which will not happen, presumably.

EDIT | June 22, 2024

Unfortunately, the FRED have a way of labeling their chart misleadingly. Actually, the GDP numbers, while referred to as annual, are actually average for the quarters of the year, so we have to “read” the numbers as “times four”.

The following paragraphs are therefore not accurate in terms of doing the math.

I’m very sorry for that. Comes from not dealing with US GDP numbers on a professional daily basis.

In effect, the rise in GDP is still only bought and forced into existence through the crazy government spending spree. There is no genuine growth, and real-world businesses are still struggling under the burden of suffocating regulations etc.

Over the two years from last quarter of 2021, the GDP (adjusted for inflation) has managed to rise for roughly not even 1 trillion dollars. For the first of the two years in the graph, GDP almost didn’t rise at all. While the government … still on “covid”-triggered absurd spending levels … pours roughly not one, but closer to TWO trillion dollars additionally into the system, annually:

Government spending: from 4 and a half trillions before the China virus onslaught up to almost 7 and still over 6 in 2022. (It’s not like the federal government was especially thrifty up to 2019 either. || The CBO projects federal government spending surpassing 7 trillions again as early as 2026, just two years away.)

You are thus witness to a real miracle. Not a good one, mind you. This is like the miracle of going into a hospital with a severe cold and ending up dead. Bidenomics has the same quality of a miracle treatment for the economy.

How is it possible, for the government to spend another dollar and only at best half or even much less of it actually shows up some place in anyone’s wallet, as wage earned?

The only reasonable explanation is that, while the additionally spent government dollar DOES end up some place and contributes to the GDP as measured officially, the real economy (think e.g. of manufacturing) in general is structurally in decline. Shrinking. Going down the drain, almost precipitously. Or in other words: Overall economic efficiency is vanishing into thin air; messed-up productivity and profitability make jobs precarious.

Bidenomics actually consist of policies

» wantonly suffocating most of the economy

» but compensating for the losses and decline

» by buying time and fake success, with endless money.

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That’s like you as a private person taking up loans beyond the pale and showing off to your neighbors, with a new pool, beautiful cars and luxurious travels, boasting about just how smart and successful you are, while in reality, you had to change into a lower paying job and have no idea how to make ends meet.

Speaking of houses and loans: the catastrophe that is Bidenomics entails not “only” crippling inflation, precarious job markets and a downward spiral for much of the economy. There is also the housing crisis, obviously much aggravated by millions of immigrants nobody knows where to place them, and the inability of regular people to get an affordable mortgage. Which in turn worsens the economic outlook for anybody in the building business. When you can’t get a decent mortgage, you can’t have a house built.

Contrast: the wealthy folks’ Casino wins

But how is it possible that the economy is in serious decline, behind a facade of numerical well-being propped up with absurd levels of government surplus spending when we’re hearing about a bullish stock market?

• Now first, stock buyers don’t care where exactly the profits of a company come from. When they are driven in parts by government spending, why not. Profit is profit, and pecunia non olet, as the Romans said. (Money doesn’t reek, even when it’s gained by somewhat disgusting schemes.)

• More importantly, especially due to the loose money policies of the government, there is so much money floating around among wealthy people, they hardly know where to place it, and the money acting on the stock market is a small share of all the money available to the actors. In other words, a small shift towards the stock market, as opposed to other assets (bonds, for instance), will drive the stocks up regardless of the “actual worth” of the stocks. It’s a play of supply and demand, like in every other market.

• The top news though is the fact that the stock market isn’t exactly thriving all over the place, over all sectors of the economy. To the contrary. It is a small number of big tech companies that generate much of the upward trend, not least driven by the AI hype. (Whether or not that will lead to another dot.com bubble, if the hopes will become real and with what effects on economy, manufacturing, services, society … who knows.)

• Besides, the economy is much more than the corporations whose stocks are in the leading indices. Think of the crushed family businesses, the lost mom&pop-stores, and countless restaurants shut down forever due to lockdown hysteria.

The main insight here is that in other (traditional) sectors than Big Tech, there isn’t any reason for complacency, let alone enthusiasm. And here again, we need to acknowledge: Despite nearly two TRILLIONS of additional input from the government that, as a Keynesian stimulus, should … according to liberal economic theory … convey enough momentum into the economy as to push it on a stable trajectory upwards.

Instead, in reality, the exploding debt and quickly rising interest rates drain the government of fiscal options in the future, since ever more interest has to be paid. To raise taxes accordingly would suffocate the economy and citizens alike even more. It is a vicious cycle with no easy off-ramp.

Not without fundamentally changing policies on all fronts, anyway. The current path is unsustainable, to use a beloved word by the leftist elites, but only when it comes to their castles in the sky without carbon emissions. About the real world, they don’t care and have not much of a clue anyway.

Almost an economic death cult

To some degree, Bidenomics is like a Ponzi scheme. Bury all problems that come with a suffocated economy under enormous heaps of money, as if there were no tomorrow, where the debt has to be repaid and the spending spree must stop in the first place.

That though would be like taking away the electric wheel chair that has enabled the guy with the broken legs … whom you crippled by shoving him down the stairs … to still get around. Or take away the alcohol that seemed to make life bearable again from the poor chap that you drove into despair by making his life miserable. Am I cynical? Not at all. These metaphors are still too lame and polite.

Much of the economy is a Zombie economy, actually. It’s still moving, kind of, and breathing asthmatically, but it would normally be dead in the water were it not for the ongoing life support through trillions of bucks out of whole cloth, basically.

Below the surface of supposedly glorious statistical numbers, which are being sold in all kinds of misleading manners anyway, there’s a growing undercurrent of rot and dissolution. And how else could it be with a government that, for instance, is actively working to drive the car manufacturing business into bankruptcy, or to China.

To sum things up and take home:

The idea that this government has “created jobs” and enabled a thriving, upward moving economy, is nothing but a propaganda lie.

• The jobs that came slowly back after the lockdowns are the result of a normalization that the Biden team has even decelerated through their power-hungry regulation policies and the willfully provoked inflation.

• To claim these “new” jobs, that are only recovered jobs, as a success … is like getting severely sick and crawling back to your previous health after 4 years, barely. Or like getting your house damaged by a hurricane and repair it, for years. Not exactly what could be seen as “pursuit of happiness” or “living your dream”.

• But not only has this administration done a poor job of repairing what got devastated by the “Democrats” very own hysteric lockdown policies; they barely managed the repair job only with their crazy spending spree.

• To compare that with Trump’s term before 2019 and claim to be better, that’s like an athletically mediocre biological male competing in women’s sports — weight lifting / swimming / wrestling — and winning some medal. Or like doping heavily and bribing the umpire, too. While moving the goalpost. You get the picture.

The GAP, or rather ABYSS, the glaring discrepancy between what they claim in terms of being economy wizards and what they actually did and still do to the country, when you look at the obvious and clear official numbers as presented above (not even accounting for their creative bookkeeping manipulations!) … put into a grand overview perspective … is really astounding in size and darkness. It’s a look into hell, almost.

Bidenomics is a snake oil business, only with a snake oil that’s not just useless, but poison. The only ones profiting are the corrupt globalist regime types and their cronies in certain sectors.

It is all a racket, and an ideologically driven destruction of true and fair capitalism and entrepreneurship, along with freedom, rule of law and the country in general.

Regular people, blue collar types, the middle class are all expendable pawns in their schemes. They get squeezed out economically, and that is not a bug, it’s a feature for the globalist aristocracy.

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Thanks for reading!