Literally the day after President Biden bragged, “We’re following my blue collar blueprint to rebuild America, and guess what? It’s working!” Bidenomics struck with a vengeance Thursday: The economy grew at just a 1.6% annualized rate in the first quarter, a third less than the consensus forecast.
And while growth is slowing (from 4.9% in last year’s third quarter, to 3.4% in the fourth, and now 1.6%), inflation is heating back up.
A key gauge of price hikes, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, excluding food and energy, surged at a 3.7% rate in the first quarter.
And that suggests interest rates will stay sky-high, since the Federal Reserve wants PCE closer to 2% before it starts easing up.
Even before Thursday, real median wages (that is, inflation-adjusted) began dropping again (as they have for most of the Biden presidency), while most of the new jobs being created are part-time positions — and many of the rest are government jobs.
So much for all those pundits who’ve been fuming that the economy’s doing great, even though that darn American public stubbornly refuses to see it.
And, yes, these are the fruits of Bidenomics — and why the prez has quit using that word.
Inflation started taking off with the passage of his American Recovery Act — and the outlays authorized then, and in his multiple followup spendapaloozas (plus in his off-budget giveaways, including fresh tens of billions in “forgiven” student-loan debt), are still going out the door, further goosing Bidenflation.
And all along, the president’s regulators have been busy adding to private-sector costs, depressing economic growth: Per the American Action Forum, Biden in just over three years in office has added more than $1 trillion-with-a-T in costs to private business and households, triple the Obama-era rate.
Meanwhile, the president’s policies have steadily, intentionally pushed up energy prices: His green-driven opposition to oil- and gas-drilling turned the nation back into an energy importer, while all the gazillions he’s dumped on wind and solar at best yield power that’s both more costly and less reliable.
(And that’s when the green spending works: New York state just saw three major wind-power projects collapse as the developers walked away, atop a series of earlier contracts that fell through after officials nixed demands for state subsidies to double.)
Yet Joe still refuses to reverse his economic-policy course, so the only thing slowing inflation has been the Fed’s drastic interest-rate hikes, which may have to get worse: Jamie Dimon warned this month that rates could go above 8% as the US economy mires down in stagflation.
Thursday’s grim GDP and PCE news vindicates that warning.
The only silver lining we can see here is that the voters will take all this into account come November: If the president won’t change course, they’ll have to change presidents.