re: Morgan Stanley credits ‘Bidenomics’ in lifting its U.S. economic-growth outlook.

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Data shows that 65 percent of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000 or more were in Democratic districts, while 74 percent of taxpayers with a household income of $100,000 or less were in Republican districts.

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DNC - party of the little people. The working class. Yeah, my arse, just like Joe Biden got 81 million votes.

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Bidenomics

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this is never going to be a thing, no matter how hard people try to make it a thing

Just wanted to say how shocked I am that a left wing organization is touting this progressive administration.

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Lowest unemployment in 60 years 13 million new jobs CHIP Lowest inflation of all G7 countries Infrastructure Investment GDP at 2% growth These are all good things.. if you can’t admit that it’s because you simply refuse to acknowledge the country is doing really well economically.

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Okay this sounds good in theory. But my wallet has a problem with believing things are great. Not to mention, inflation may be slowing down, but the lowest of G7 nations is the white speckle of chicken shite. Prices are still up while wage growth is nominal at best.

Wage increase thus far in 2023 sits at 3.8%.

The President doesn’t set retail prices. Perhaps the huge corps showing record profits is the problem

Real wages today are lower than they were in February 2020.

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US Real Average Hourly Earnings is at a current level of 11.05, up from 11.03 last month and up from 10.92 one year ago. This is a change of 0.18% from last month and 1.19% from one year ago.

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If only there was a word to describe such a growth. Rapid? No. Escalating? No. Those words sound like large bursts. These numbers sound relatively small…almost nominal.

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13 million new jobs

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Mother
fricking
Liar

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The US economy is doing very well and the stock market is booming.

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Not exactly. While the market is doing well, the economy is still suffering.

While the rate of inflation has shrunk, it's still increasing and it's outpaced wages by so much and for so long that most buyers are still behind even though they're being told they are doing better (see: 1984 & chocolate rations).

Let's look at CPI's Food category, for instance. Food inflation has come down, but you have to consider that:

A: It's still high (5.7% for last month)

B: There's a compounding effect once you go back beyond just 12 months. For example, the June 2023 12-month is 5.7%, which is 5.7% over the 9.1% from last year, which was an increase of 9.1% over the previous year, meaning we currently see an average increase of ~16.3% from 2021 prices.

I think the problem with the Food category is that there's no weighting (at least that I know of) based on most-purchased items (like bread or soft drinks), meaning that items with lower price increases are likely skewing the overall change lower than what consumers are actually experiencing.

Let's take bread (by pound) for example.

In June 2021 the national average price was $1.510/pound
In June 2022 the national average price was $1.691/pound
In June 2023 the national average price was $1.937/pound

This means we saw a ~10.3% increase from June 2021 to June 2022 then a ~12.% increase from June 2022 to June 2023. So for something like bread, we still see over a 20% increase in price even though the rate of inflation on it is dropping. That's well above the average CPI for food and it's a product most people buy. It's a similar story with soft drinks.

This is why people are still complaining that their grocery bills are so high even though the implications levelled when touting the drop in CPI is that their bills should be lower.

We can look at other aspects of the economy to see current and/or likely future issues as well (the auto industry is prepping for a new-car-buying drought, for example).

Yet another we can look at is employment. The LFPR, for example, has stalled well below the pre-COVID levels even though we've seen thousands and thousands of layoffs over the last 6-8 months. Another example is that the vast majority of the new jobs being created (the actual new jobs, not just the post-COVID refills) have been service industry jobs (government and tourism/leisure). Those aren't as sustainable as manufacturing (which seems to have plateaued since December-ish).

And finally, there's the fact that Congress (and Biden) still seem hellbent on spending however much they want regardless of revenues. Their idea to address this? Hold spending to FY2022 levels (which is the 4th highest annual deficit on record: OMB spreadsheet). Such high levels of deficit spending creates inflation by creating Dollars out of thin air.

Effectively we're whistling while walking through the graveyard.