Danny

Establishment Democrats love this chart. They point to that 12% average increase in the incomes of households at the 10th percentile between 2019 and 2024 as DEFINITIVE PROOF that Biden “delivered” for working people, and that working people have nothing to complain about. They, of course, never stop to ask themselves what that 12% increase actually amounts to for an actual person. A household at the 10th-percentile earned a little under $15,000 a year in 2019. Assuming they actually experienced a 12 percent increase in their income over the next five years—and that’s an unfounded assumption considering the 12-percent figure is just an average—that means they were making around $1,800 more annually by 2024, or a grand total of $16,800. That was never enough for a single person—let alone a 2- or 3- or 4-person household—to live on. With that in mind, how do you think that person feels when they go to the grocery store and find everything from bread and butter to milk and meat has become more expensive? When seemingly any small trip to the grocery store now runs them $50 or more? When their rent has gone up 10 or 20 or 30 percent? This graph has little or nothing to do with reality.

I am shocked that this remains a befuddling thing for DC democrats and pundits. For fuck’s sake, in the last two years of the Biden administration, we took away expansions of the child tax credit, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance; we let the Fed raise interest rates on everything from cars, to homes, to credit cards; and then (!) we largely stood by while dominant firms raised the cost of rent, groceries, and everything else. Why would voters think the economy is anything BUT “not so good/poor”?!?