(ThyBlackMan.com) Say what you will, but Adam Smith was a brilliant cat and was well before his time. And if you have ever read the 300-plus pages The Theory of Moral Sentiments you would understand where I am coming from. Seems that the purported father of modern capitalism shows how our moral ideas and actions are a consequence of our very nature as human beings as social creatures. It argues that examining our social psychology is a better conveyance to moral action than reason. It links the basic rules of judiciousness and fairness that are required for society to survive and delineate the added, beneficent actions that enable it to thrive.
Taking all of this into consideration, from a topical view, the economic groundwork of Bidenomics does none of the above. Last week Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) demonstrated this while questioning Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on the Biden administration’s economic approach. Expressing concern over inflation and the rising cost of living, he engaged with the Secretary to explain the Biden economic policy concerning its impact on the American people.
Kennedy was swift to acknowledge the deviation between wage growth and the skyrocketing cost of living. Despite the rise in wages, many Americans find themselves barely able to stay afloat in the face of escalating expenses since real mathematic wage growth under the Biden Administration has declined.
Senator Kennedy summed this up by saying: “Bidenomics is really just paying more to live worse.”
When Biden assumed the Presidency, the week he took office in January 2021 gas averaged $2.39 a gallon nationally. The rate of inflation was 1.4 percent. By March 2023, the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index indicated that the 40-year record inflation had resulted in the American family paying over $700 more per month to buy the same goods and services as they did when President Biden took office. By October of the same year, it was estimated that a family of four was paying $15,133 per year, or $1,261 per month, more to purchase the same goods and services compared to the day President Biden assumed the office
Even now, although somewhat lower, inflation continues to crush our standard of living. Real wages, or what folks get paid when adjusted for inflation keep on falling every month this man has been in the Presidency. Since President Biden took office, the increase in prices due to inflation has skyrocketed. I have personally seen estimates ranging from 13 to 17 percent over the past three years . In many cases, this can represent at least a 4 percent loss in real wages for an individual.
What is wrong should be easy to see, post-pandemic, Biden policies focused on things that were not kitchen table issues. Mainly his incessant focus on LGBTQ+LMNOP rights, abrogating fossil fuel use in America, and bad foreign policy. The average person and family just see higher grocery and gas bills than four years ago. This means that milk, bacon, eggs, bread orange juice, coffee, sugar, and cookies are more expensive and impossible to ignore anytime someone checks out at the store.
There is also the impact of DEI, equity, and soft-on-crime policies that are forced on the general public by the Whitehouse and the progressive wing of the Democrat party. What do you expect when you raise your minimum wage to 20$ an hour for unskilled labor? When mandated, businesses that can afford it will resort to robots and kiosks that come with less liability (see AmazonGo). The result is it becomes unaffordable to the average customer. Now you have Mcdonald’s charging $11 for a Big Mac Meal (in my neck of the South) and Restaurants and businesses the likes of Denny’s, Saks Off Fifth, Anthropologie, Office Depot, Walgreens (150 stores nationwide), Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Crate & Barrel are all closing shop in or leaving major California cities.
Now you lose your revenue and that unskilled worker has no job. This is what happens when you demand that a job meant for teenagers and those without real-life work experience get paid a laughable amount of coin to flip burgers. At the same time, I can’t locate any American laughing about earning 3 to 4% lower wages and having to pay up to 17% higher prices. And if you are trying to purchase a home, good luck with that with inflation and a 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 7.65%.
To be honest, they have changed the formula for how they calculate the cost of living inflation, leaving out things like the cost of food, gas, and energy, I do not feel profoundly confident in quoting these government figures – I think they are even worse. The stuff most middle-class and poor people spend most on are things we need to live, to survive. We want our kids to actually learn and do well in school or any merit-based performance setting. We are not interested in the government or individual teachers trying to get our children to learn to be gay at school or in tossing away trillions of dollars to support the killing in Ukraine.
At this rate, American citizens will be walking around begging for change and going around collecting cans and scrap metal for money while illegal immigrants are granted free phones, hotel rooms, food, clothing, and monthly pre-paid credit cards.
It’s insane how expensive things have gotten. People’s bank accounts are constantly in the negative and many have gotten behind on loans since interest went up big time a while back under President Biden. People are doing what they can just to keep a roof over their heads and are cutting back on many things they took for granted. Taking the family out to eat once a week is for many, no longer a practical option. Many millions of people do not have an uncle or other family members to help ease the burden off their shoulders under these stressful economic times. I just don’t know how this keeps up. We may get to the point of people starving to death or at least getting admitted to the ER from malnutrition in the USA and this is very sad.
They tell us that inflation is low, but if it was still measured the way that it was back in 1980, the official rate of inflation would be well into double-digit territory. When a working-age American is not working, the government puts that individual into one of two categories. Right now, there are only 6.5 million U.S. adults that are officially considered to be “unemployed”. But another 99.9 million U.S. adults are considered to be “not in the labor force”. So they don’t count as being “unemployed”.
When you add those two numbers together, you get a total of nearly 110 million U.S. adults who do not have a job right now. This is made worse seeing that survey after survey has shown that most of the U.S. population is currently living paycheck to paycheck. At the end of 2023, it was reported that 60 percent of adults said they were living paycheck to paycheck. Around 40 percent of consumers consider themselves to be worse off now than in 2022. Even higher earners are struggling to get by, with 42 to 49 percent of those making six figures also living check-to-check under President Joe Biden.
Also, if Biden gets his way with his proposed ESG global warming plans for the farm industry In America, prices on all staples will likely increase by 35 to 80 percent in price for all US consumers.
What the Biden administration and Bidenomics fail to understand is that people do not function economically from what is reported on paper. Anything can look good on paper but when Housing/rent, healthcare, and higher education are through the roof, not to mention food prices, no one will GAF. If your housing cost goes up 30% and then stops going up is everything ok now? No, you’ve got to contend with that increase forever. If the price of a house goes up 20% do you pay 20% more? No, a lot more than that because interest rates have gone up too, and over 30 years most of what you pay is interest. More jobs huh? Employment includes part-time. These are not real jobs with benefits and a future, and that’s where most of the gains have come from. What do I care what the government statistics say, or the media for that matter? I live in the real world.
Until economists in the US stop overemphasizing core inflation (which ignores food and gas price instability for ordinary Americans), they will never understand the economic pain we feel. Not until then will they be aware of the wise words of Senator Kennedy when he stated that “Bidenomics is really just paying more to live worse.”
Staff Writer; Torrance T. Stephens
Can also purchase any of his books over at; Amazon – TTS Books.