By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, January 07, 2025
Last month, President Biden made one of his increasingly
rare trips from the White House to once again tell Americans they had enjoyed a terrific economy during his presidency. “We got
back to full employment, got inflation back down, managed the soft landing that
most people thought was not very much likely to happen. . . . As inflation and
interest rates continue to fall, we’ve entered a new phase of our economic
resurgence.”
When voters went to the polls in November, they largely
vehemently disagreed with Biden’s belief in an ongoing American economic
resurgence. In exit polls, just 5 percent of voters characterized the
condition of the nation’s economy as “excellent,” 27 percent said “good,” 35
percent said, “not so good,” and 33 percent characterized it as “poor.”
One of Biden’s preferred excuses for bad economic
performance is to insist what ails the U.S. economy are just uncontrollable
global factors that no administration could have better mitigated. “The entire
world faced a spike in inflation due to disruptions from the pandemic and
Putin’s war in Ukraine. . . . Now inflation is coming down faster than almost
anywhere in the world, in advanced economies,” Biden said last month.
Biden insisted, “I believe the economy I’m leaving at the
moment — and others could do better than I did; I’m not saying I was perfect —
but ends up, at this moment, the best economy, strongest economy in the world
and for all Americans, doing better.”
It will probably not shock you to learn that Biden’s rosy
assessment is not backed up by the facts or the official statistics.
So which nation’s economy can fairly be said to have
thrived in 2024? The Economist put together a measuring stick that combined gross domestic
product growth from September 30, 2023, to September 30, 2024; stock market
performance over the past year, core inflation as of November 2024, change in
unemployment rate in the year leading up to September 30, 2024, and government
deficits — “for 37 mostly rich countries,” and then ranked each economy based
on its performance to create a combined score.
Overall, Spain ranked first, Ireland second, and Greece
and Denmark tied for third. The U.S. ranked 20th overall, in what can at best
be called a very mixed bag — ranking ninth among the 37 countries in GDP,
fourth in stock market performance, 23rd in inflation, 29th in change in
unemployment rate over the past year, and 31st in estimated deficit growth
compared to GDP.
This lines up with what the casual observer would
conclude about the U.S. economy: American workers
are still pretty darn productive, the stock
market had a great year, inflation is mitigated from its 2022 heights but the resulting cost of
living is still high, unemployment is low by
historical standards but ticking up, and the federal government has gone on
a shameless runaway spending spree.
A subsequent letter to the editor noted that the Economist study
had ignored Taiwan, and “According to the International Monetary Fund, Taiwan
grew almost a percentage point faster than Spain, which topped your list of the
best economies. Taiwan’s stock market grew twice as fast as Spain’s index. Its
inflation was slower, nearly spot-on its 2 percent target. The unemployment
rate has held steady below 3.5 percent. . . . Perhaps it is time for believers
in liberalism to ditch the conspiracy of silence orchestrated by a communist
dictatorship against the developed country with the smallest and most efficient
state in the world.”
It would be nice to get a smaller and more efficient
state over here, too.
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