It is getting increasingly difficult for the Republican Party to argue that the economy is not doing well. This is something that is not currently in these hypothetical polls. That bodes well for Joe Biden, and not so well, for Republicans. And I want to talk about it a little bit. Now, I want to say up front, anybody who’s going to take issue with the metrics that I’m going to present by saying these metrics are incomplete, or they don’t tell the full picture, or there’s something missing from these metrics, it’s important to know that the very same people that were previously arguing the economy was bad based on these metrics now say they can’t be trusted. So let’s all agree for the purposes of this conversation, that no single metric. unemployment or the stock market or inflation, no single metric is perfect or tells you the whole story about the economy, but that in their sum total, especially if we track these metrics over decades, as we have, they do give us an idea of how the economy is doing.
There are lots of Republicans arguing that the economy is a disaster under Joe Biden. It’s actually almost impossible to find any statistic that helps make that case. We recently learned that inflation in October was zero. Now, whenever I say this, people come back and go, have you been to the grocery store? Have you been there have you been here, we don’t measure inflation by what one person sees as the price of eggs in the grocery store. We use the consumer price index, a basket of goods adjusted to their nature, you know, if avocados get twice as big, but they cost twice as much, they’re not really more expensive in terms of what you get per dollar, right? You it’s actually quite a sophisticated metric. When you look at that metric, inflation was zero in October, and for the 12 month period, ending at the end of October, inflation was 3.2%. That is really close to what is considered the normal, desirable, typical amount of inflation, which is two to 3% per year.
This doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been higher inflation. Previously, prices haven’t come down, they just have been going up much more slowly, which is expected. But the inflation case of out of control inflation, under Biden, inflation has reduced dramatically under President Joe Biden. We then have employment. We have a situation right now, where employment was so low, and I’m sorry, unemployment was so low, that some economists started to say we actually need unemployment to go up a little bit in order to provide some breathing room in the economy. And we’ve seen unemployment below 4% for the longest period in decades under Joe Biden. And it ticked up by like point one at the last report, and that was considered a good sign by economists. So we can’t say prices are rising out of control. We can’t say that people are out of work in any significant numbers because they’re not.
So then we get to; Okay, well, what about some other metrics that we might look at? What about GDP? GDP numbers after experiencing some erratic ups and downs during the COVID era, have really settled and normalized at a very reasonable and good level. We’ve seen quarterly GDP annualized, right around that two to 4% range that is often expected or anticipated as normal and relatively healthy for an economy as mature as is the United States economy. When we look at things like exports versus imports, the United States has been in a similar trade deficit since the 70s for reasons that are far beyond the control of any one president. They are not remarkably bad numbers, it all seems completely and totally fine.
Some folks will point to the labor participation rate when the unemployment numbers don’t give them what they want, they’ll point to the labor participation rate. The labor participation rate is completely unremarkable right now. It’s within the expected range that we would see, based on the age of the American population, it’s hard to make that case that the economy is doing poorly. And as far as the stock market is concerned, it’s doing fine. There have been some periods of shakiness up and down, up and down. But if you just look at the stock markets and stroke, Joe Biden became president, the stock market is doing fine.
Now you can introduce other metrics, but what about wages? We have actually seen relatively healthy and historically high wage growth under President Joe Biden. Has it kept up with inflation going all the way back to this inflationary period? Maybe not, but to say wages are down nominally is not true, and we’ve actually seen some very relatively healthy wage growth. So the point here is if you are going to hang your hat on the economy, and your argument is that the Biden economy is terrible, you’re going to have to bring some data forward. And I’m simply not able to find that data. If you are, then certainly let me know what it is.
