No, Economic Facts are not Evil

Responding to some of my critics

I've received a number of comments from people who think that by dismissing the “economic pain” argument for the election of Donald Trump I'm somehow saying that the economy is great for everyone and that it’s all sunshine and rainbows.

I’m getting really, really, fucking sick of these comments. As if I'm not aware of this stuff. I’m really fucking pissed off about that so what follows will have a lot of profanity. I apologize in advance, but I feel this sort of language is necessary to convey my feelings on the matter.

This argument is so unbelievably, fucking stupid. Suffice it to say, my dismissing the “economic pain” argument is not a defense of neoliberalism, nor is it a denial that people have a hard time surviving under this—or any other—capitalist economy which continues to marginalize more and more individuals. Those assholes are putting words in my mouth. What the whole argument really boiled down to was:

1. The economy is uniquely bad under Joe Biden and the Democrats, therefore:

2. People voted for Donald Trump.

That's it. That's all. That's the argument I was critiquing, and have critiqued a number of times.

Notice what that argument does not say. Nowhere does it say that everyone is doing great under late-stage capitalism. Nowhere does it say that the status quo is desirable or that we shouldn't do better. Nowhere does it say that marginalized people aren't suffering. Nowhere does it say that shouldn't radically rethink the economic basis of our society or that running every institution to maximize investor returns is a good idea.

Nope, it doesn’t say any of those things. However, that didn't stop a few commenters from crawling out of the woodwork to scold me for supposedly ignoring marginalized or working class people, either because they're stupid or because they failed at reading comprehension.

Homelessness; drug addiction; dropping academic performance; atrocious public health; rising depression and anxiety; lack of maternity/paternity leave; overpriced healthcare, childcare and shelter; predatory corporations; financialization; mass shootings—I mean these are all serious fucking problems. But these somehow these only become problems when Democrats are running for office, never for Republicans who do fuck all to solve any of these issues (and, in fact, make them worse). I mean, I wrote a whole fucking post about this topic, for Christ's sake. But these were problems before Joe Biden, and they will be after. None that is relevant to what I was arguing against, which was the idea that all of this would somehow be better if we elected a corrupt, incompetent, fascist dictator who tried to overthrow the government once already and is backed by a cabal of libertarian billionaire oligarchs who want to eliminate democracy.

Recall that in the run-up to the election, we were told over and over again by the entire media apparatus and the pundits that the economy was in far, far worse shape under Joe Biden than under any president in modern history. That we were in a second Great Depression. That no former president had ever presided over such an economic catastrophe and so the poor, suffering masses had no choice but to elect the Orange One to save them.

(Notice, by the way, that the entire media has stopped talking about “economic pain” and inflation altogether now that the election is over. So I guess everything is all right now? And I'm the one you're getting mad at? Seriously?)

Anyway, the assumption from the above statements is that:

1. Working people will suffer less under Donald Trump.

What I'm wondering is: Why is Joe Biden the first president to have to own all of the failures of the past fifty-plus years of neoliberal economics—a list which includes Trump himself, by the way, who was president just four years ago which everyone seems to have collectively forgotten.

It's interesting how the trickle-down economic paradigm spearheaded by Republicans under Ronald Reagan and his successors is now associated exclusively with the Democrats. And by the way, the reason the Democrats embraced neoliberalism and trickle-down economics in the first place is because they spent more than a decade consistently losing every election in the country to Republicans in aftermath of Reagan's landslide victory. Yet, somehow, the Republicans themselves are held blameless for any of this! Kind of like how they initiated the wars in Middle East but now run against those same wars. I feel like this is all some sort of psyop.

Furthermore, in order to accept the above arguments, you have to accept two other premises:

1. The president directly controls the prices of goods and services in a free market economy (e.g. eggs, gasoline, houses).

2. Inflation is exclusively the fault of the president.

Apparently a lot of people believed those things, but that doesn't make them true. It just means that a lot of voters were too fucking stupid to know otherwise. Do you people really believe this? If not, then what the hell did you expect politicians to do about rising prices? I'll wait.

Furthermore, when judging the state of the economy, there are two criteria to consider:

1. The status of the economy as it is has been since the end of the New Deal and the rise of neoliberalism under Ronald Reagan. In other words, the economy as it's actually existed for the past fifty years.

2. A comparison to the New Deal economic system that many of us, including me, want restored which causes rising wages and provides abundant public goods and a social safety net to protect people from the ravages of capitalism.

When assessing the economy, I used criteria #1, since that's what we now live under and it was the only thing on offer from either candidate. Also, every candidate that has tried to move us closer to economy #2 has been soundly rejected by the voting public, which is just a sad-but-true fact. A lot of you very online people seem to have bought the libertarian propaganda that all good economic statistics are fake and don't affect anyone, but bad statistics are 100% true and affect everybody. I would say get your head out of your ass.

And finally, as a corollary a lot of people seem to believe that:

1. Things are so bad we need to tear down the existing economic, social and political systems, no matter how much suffering it causes or how many people die.

2. The working class which I supposedly care so much about will be better off under the new system.

Because that's the argument a lot of you are making, whether you realize it or not. I don't agree, and I'm sorry that I seem to have cultivated a lot of radical, brain-dead edgelords who apparently think unreconstructed fascism is better alternative than what we have now. Apparently you've never read a goddamn history book. I also submit that you don't really give a damn about the working class, or marginalized people, and are morally bankrupt sociopaths who see ordinary people as NPCs in the quest to build your ideal society which you think everyone else will naturally agree with (spoiler: they won't).

There’s a folder in the Kremlin and the Heritage Foundation labeled “oppositional defiant personality types” with your name on it which contains the exact online manipulation techniques that have turned you former so-called leftists into a bunch of raving goddamn fascists (e.g. pandemic conspiracies); but, yeah, I'm the enemy because vaccines, or imperialism, or whatever. Here is some advice: go fuck yourselves. And if you are thinking of leaving another indignant, self-righteous comment, may I suggest you print it out instead, douse it in gasoline, stick it up your ass, and set it on fire.

1.

Let's start with the first point, above. I think it’s time for a history lesson. People forget that virtually every economist in the world said that we needed at least ten percent unemployment or higher before inflation would start to come down or slow. That is, all the big-brained economists were loudly clamoring for mass unemployment.

In fact, you saw this in the media. Every report of low levels of unemployment was greeted with alarm, if not outright panic. Low unemployment numbers were portrayed as a catastrophe that would condemn us all to decades of high inflation in the financial press. In order to combat this, they said, we needed a recession and mass unemployment because that was supposedly the only way prices would ever stop rising. Larry Summers—Obama's chief economic advisor—stated that the U.S. needed to have a recession that spiked unemployment numbers to bring down inflation.

“We need five years of unemployment above 5 percent to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment,” Summers said during a speech at the London School of Economics.

So, yeah, the working class is suffering. But is it not possible they would be suffering more under 10% unemployment? Because that's what all the economists were calling for in 2021-2022.

The economics priesthood also loudly sounded the alarm over all the money that governments around the world spent to mitigate or ameliorate the affects of the COVID-19 pandemic. That led to the usual round of deficit hysteria, which led to calls to immediately bring down the deficit through government austerity. That is, recession, austerity and mass unemployment were the medicine that economists recommended in the aftermath of the pandemic.

And, in fact, those calls were heeded by the Obama administration when he was dealing with the aftermath of cascading bank failures, millions of foreclosed homes, and the cost of the bailouts. Instead of expanding the government's balance sheet in order to mitigate the economic suffering of ordinary Americans, he listened to economists like Summers and decided to be “responsible” to pay down the debt. The result? Low economic growth and enormous unnecessary suffering which we are still living with today.

Brutal austerity. Mass unemployment. Drastically reduced living standards and maybe even higher mortality rates. This was that the economic medicine prescribed by almost every high-ranking economist on the planet to get us back to normal after the pandemic.

Don't you think the working class would have been worse off under those things? I certainly think so.

You know who didn't listen to the advice of those economists? Joe Biden and his economic advisors. Instead of inducing a recession, they ran the economy hot. Do you you know what happened? Unemployment stayed low while inflation came down at the same time. That didn't happen overnight, of course. It’s true that high inflation ran ahead of wages from 2021 through early 2023 which did indeed cause economic pain and hardship for a lot of people.

However, strangely, the Democrats actually overperformed in the 2022 election cycle compared to this year. That certainly makes the “economic pain” and “inflation” arguments rather suspicious to me. Wages in aggregate have since exceeded inflation, and no, dumbass, that does not mean that some people aren't suffering. It just means the “economic pain” argument is questionable, along with the assumption that we're living in the worst economy in American history. And then there’s stuff like this:

Do you really think the economy is that different for Republicans than it is for Democrats? Or is it just perception?

Unlike Obama, Joe Biden invested in the country in a way that we have not seen since the New Deal. The American Jobs Plan. The American Families Plan. The Build Back Better Act. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The CHIPS and Science act. The Inflation Reduction Act. The usual suspects cried bloody murder about how all this “government money printing” was going to cause runaway hyperinflation, just as they have done for the past fifty years. However, once again, they were full of shit, and it's been found that pandemic programs only added at most about a fraction of a percent to inflation while delivering significant benefits including creating lots of working class and blue collar jobs.

Inflation is now back to the historical average it was in the years leading up to the pandemic, with unemployment relatively low and no recession in sight (for now). This went against the advice of almost every notable economist on the planet. They wrote op-eds and editorials. They clutched their pearls. But the Biden administration held steady and the economy stayed hot. It took a lot of courage and political will to do that. In fact, if you're being generous, this policy reversal from Obama to Biden in favor of increased spending and investment was prompted by the fear of another Trump term. In the end, however, none of it mattered.

When it came to labor unions—an essential linchpin of any working class-centric economy—Biden has been one of the more pro-union presidents in the modern era. He literally saved the Teamster's pensions, who then turned around and spat in his face and whose members voted for Republicans instead. Obama claimed he'd be the first president to walk a picket line, while Biden actually did it. He even did a bunch of things that were long-time pet issues for the Bernie Left, including student loan debt forgiveness, legalizing marijuana, capping the price of insulin, and even dropping charges against Russian catspaw Julian Assange. He even withdrew from Afghanistan, spending significant political capital in order to do so. None of it mattered—the Bernie Left, like union members, spat in his face.

Here's CNN summarizing the results of Biden’s economic policies:

America’s economy is about to stick what’s called a “soft landing,” which is when inflation returns to the Fed’s target without a recession — a feat that’s only happened once, during the 1990s, according to some economists...The economy’s enduring strength is also a boon for the Biden administration. Despite the Fed aggressively raising interest rates to tamp down inflation, which have been perched at a 23-year high since last July, the economy has so far avoided a recession. Last year, the resilience of the US consumer shocked economists who widely expected an economic downturn to ensue.

The Economic Policy Institute, a left-wing think tank, found that wages for people at the bottom of the income distribution have actually gone up for the first time in the modern era: Fastest wage growth over the last four years among historically disadvantaged groups. Low-wage workers’ wages surged after decades of slow growth (EPI). You really don’t think those things affected anyone???

That's what I'm talking about. It took a lot of courage and political will to do those things and tell mainstream economists like Larry Summers to go fuck themselves, but Biden did so, and the American people are better off because of it. No recession, no mass unemployment, and no austerity. But, apparently according to the assholes commenting on my posts, none of that matters. All they want is to bitch and moan about how the Democrats are worst, most evil political party in the entire world. Well, there are lot of other places you can go for that these days, either on Substack or on servers hosted in Eastern Europe.

Do you people really think there was no difference at all between Biden and the neoliberal Democrats and Republicans who have controlled this country since Reagan? Do people really think that strong economic indicators are by themselves are evil and imply that everything is sunshine and roses? Look, I've lived through periods of recession and high unemployment, and I can tell you that, as a working-class person, I'd much rather live through non-recessions and periods of low unemployment, and I think most working-class people feel the same way. Somehow that makes me the bad guy. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Get offline and live in the real world for a change.

Here's a summary of Biden's economic program provided by Wikipedia. I've highlighted some of the passages that affect “ordinary working stiffs”—you know, the same people that these commenters think I'm ignoring.

The March 2021 enactment of the American Rescue Plan to provide relief from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was the first major element of [President Biden's economic] policy. Biden's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed into law in November 2021 and contains about $550 billion in additional investment. Biden also signed three major pieces of longer-term economic legislation to repair infrastructure like roads, bridges and water pipes, boost semiconductor investment, and expand green energy.

The first year of the Biden presidency (2021) saw strong growth in real GDP, wages, employment, stock market returns, and household net worth, coupled with an increase in inflation, as the economy recovered from the pandemic recession of 2020. During 2022–2023, the unemployment rate averaged 3.6%. By April 2024, the unemployment rate had remained below 4.0% for the longest sustained period since 1953...Inflation increased up to 9.0% in June 2022 began swiftly abating and by November 2023 the inflation rate stood at 3.2% and summer 2024 had returned near target levels. While inflation was similar to peer countries, the U.S. has outgrown its peers...

The New Republic praised Biden's economic record in July 2024, highlighting how record low unemployment led to wage growth at the lower half of the distribution...The expansion of the Affordable Care Act, the child tax credit, $1400 stimulus checks, and the expansion of SNAP benefits also boosted balance sheets for low and middle-income Americans. New business formation is also up 30% from pre-pandemic levels, and notably strong among women and women of color...

Biden took anti-trust more seriously than presidents in recent memory, as seen by the work of Lina Khan at the FTC. The administration also pursued lower drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices it pays and capping the price of insulin....Despite Biden's promotion of clean energy, and Republican assertions he was waging "war on American energy," by the end of his third year the United States was producing more crude oil than any country in history...By the end of Biden's first year in office, the Department of Education had forgiven $15 billion in debt for 675,000 borrowers.

Surveys have also found most Americans view their own economic situation positively and rate their local and state economies as doing better than the national economy, hinting at a disconnect fueled more by media narrative. For example, a March 2024 CBS News poll found that 65% of Americans viewed the economy under Biden's predecessor(and eventual successor), Donald Trump, as good, whereas only 38% expressed a similar positive opinion of the current economy under Biden...

Do you people really think those economic policies don't make a lick of difference to the lives of anyone, anyone at all??? Not a single, fucking person? Because that's what you people seem to be arguing. You seem to be telling me that by merely pointing out these economic facts that I'm minimizing and ignoring the suffering of certain people in this economy—people who would have suffered far more had Biden listened to conventional wisdom and done what the mainstream economists told him to do. Joe Biden was the first Democrat in my lifetime to move decisively away from neoliberal economics. I think that's a big deal. But instead of rewarding him for it, the voters chose fascism instead, for whatever reason. Now the Democrats are already taking about running back to the political right again because of it. Excuse me if I think that's a fucking tragedy.

The one thing you can blame Biden for is withdrawing a lot of the programs that provided support for people during the pandemic. He should not have done that. But do you know why he did it? It was a concession to the Republicans. The Republicans would have fought tooth-and-nail to stop those programs from continuing. They said those programs were “too expensive.” So why are working-class people exclusively blaming the Democrats for that and supporting Republicans instead? It's the usual pattern—Republicans sabotage efforts to deal with problems, and then run on those problems (e.g immigration). I'm sorry I'm not stupid enough to fall for it like some of you people.

Okay, let's talk about inflation. What caused inflation? Well, I wrote a whole series of posts about it a while back, but I guess people are too stupid or lazy to read them, which is another reason I'm pissed off. Why do people bother to make ignorant comments when they clearly have not read any of my previous posts?

Well, to summarize, the evidence is that factories shut down and people couldn't go to work to produce the goods and services we all depend on, and global shipping effectively shut down so it was impossible to get stuff to the people who wanted to buy it in sufficient quantities to keep prices from rising. Plus, since people couldn't go out for dinner and a movie anymore, they had all this extra money which they plowed into buying stuff online—stuff that was hard to come by for the reasons above.

Then there was the biggest reason: the consolidation of nearly every industry into monopolies and oligopolies which raised prices using inflation as a cover—a phenomenon known as seller's inflation which has been extensively documented. Some added effects were bad harvests around the world due to climate-related disasters, a spike in energy prices due to war, and labor shortages.

We covered all of this in my posts about inflation and why to the “too much money” argument has always been gaslighting by economists to tie the government’s hands in order to prevent them from spending money to help ordinary citizens (but not the rich). Thankfully Biden didn't listen. Analysis has shown that government spending did very little to raise inflation compared to supply chain shocks:

The lagged effects of COVID-19 supply chain disruptions on inflation (Brookings)

From that standpoint, the best thing to do for inflation was not to raise interest rates, which makes it harder for working class people to buy a house or pay their credit card bills, it's to break up monopolies who have too much pricing power. Who is doing that? The Democrats, as noted in the Wikipedia article, above. Who is guaranteed not to do that? The Republicans (maybe—I've heard that Lina Khan does have some supporters among Republicans like JD Vance. We'll have to see which faction prevails).

A lot of people told Biden that if he spent money on Americans it would cause runaway inflation. But he did it anyway, and it led to pretty good economic conditions and inflation coming back down to reasonable levels. Did it fix all the problems in the economy in under four years? No, how could it? Was that a reasonable exception, even for a president who wasn't dealing with the aftermath of an unprecedented global catastrophe? What did you expect him to do differently?

And besides, what is the alternative? Well, I guess we're going to find out.

2.

Now let’s take on the second question: will the working class be better off under Donald Trump?

Let's see, everything I've been reading so far in the media has been about the plans by unelected, ketamine-addicted billionaires to fire tens of thousands of government workers, cut trillions from the federal budget, and crash the economy on purpose “for it's own good” following the model of Javier Millei, the radical ultra-libertarian chaos Hobbit from Argentina who has thrown half his country’s citizens into poverty.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is not going to make marginalized or working class people better off.

And the latest news is that Trump, with control over all branches of the government, is looking to achieve the Republican Holy Grail of eliminating Social Security, and possibly other entitlement programs as well.

If you think the working class has it bad right now, how much worse off do you think they will be when Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid go away? Because that’s what we're looking at. Oh, and of course they're going to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—one of the few agencies that protects ordinary citizens from the ruthless predations of corporations and big business.

US Plutocrats $276 Billion Richer Since Trump Win—And GOP Wants to Give Them Even More (Common Dreams)

The alleged working-class appeal of Trumpenomics is based on assumptions I just don't find valid:

1. The primary cause of working class immiseration is illegal immigrants.

2. Punitive and universal tariffs will restore the Fordist economy of 1946-1973.

Someone mentioned a post I wrote years ago called The White Ghost Dance. Apparently, they took the wrong message from that post, because the whole point was that, um, the Ghost Dance didn't work! The Ghost Dance is symbolic of reactions taken by marginalized people that don't actually solve any problems and may even make the situation worse, but feels like it will do something. I argued that supporting Donald Trump was effectively a modern-day manifestation of the Ghost Dance mentality, except for working-class white people in the Rust Belt instead of Native Americans on the Great Plains. I was pointing out that voting for Trump was an ineffective way to deal with working class immiseration, and was fundamentally based on irrationality, just like the Ghost Dance. But apparently his person was too stupid to realize this and just wanted their regular fix of masturbatory woe-porn instead.

I don't think Trump’s policies will help working class Americans. And as for marginalized people, fascists, unlike liberals, do have a solution to the problem. Do you what it is? Exterminism. President Musk often rants on Twitter about how the Democrats want to turn the whole country into San Francisco. Do you know what he doesn’t like about San Fransisco? The homeless people. The addicts. The unemployed. The marginalized. Do you think he actually wants to help those people? Or do you think that only illegal immigrants are going to end up in those concentration camps? Go on Hacker News sometime to see what rich techlords think of the rest of us and ask yourselves whether marginalized people will be suffer less when those same techlords rule without being shackled by democracy or the rule of law. As for me, I’m skeptical.

Yes, people are suffering, to such an extent that they are turning to cold-blooded murder in order to deal with the problems in our society because they are left with no other option. We don't know for sure why the United Healh Insurance CEO was killed (yet), but the reaction to it tells you everything you need to know about the state of our society and why people are turning to bullets instead of ballots. And it’s about to get worse.

So I stand by my claim that it wasn't really “economic pain” or inflation that ultimately returned Trump to office, and that everyone—marginalized and working class people included—would have been better off under a Harris/Walz administration (and I didn't even bring up all the progressive policies Walz has accomplished in Minnesota). And if you don't agree, that's okay. But don't you dare fucking tell me I don’t care about the suffering of working class people after writing about it for decades and living it myself. I have a message for those people: fuck you. Fuck. You.

End of rant.

UPDATE: Interesting take from James K. Galbraith (The Nation). I don’t think this explains why people voted for Trump (which I suspect was mainly propaganda/culture war), but it does explain why people didn’t think Bidenomics was as good as the numbers warranted. Related, I liked this comment (edited):

One of the flaws in the discourse around elections is that media tends to judge a president based on factors that a president has no control over. What presidents can control are often too long-term for the benefits to accrue in time to get political benefit.

Republicans appear to have mastered the necessary skills for modern-day politicking. Do nothing, lie about your achievements, and blame the other party for anything [that] goes wrong.

Democrats, meanwhile, are expected to solve every problem for every person in the country. Biden presides over record-setting jobs growth, a reduction of pandemic-induced inflation that no one predicted was possible, spurred massive investment in manufacturing and green energy, but people are pissed off! Betty doesn't like seeing the homeless person at the bus stop, Billy's boss wants him to work late on Friday, and Dick and Jane now have to pay 18% more for bacon for the kids. It's too bad, really, because democracy had a good run. But autocracy, here we come.