Not everyone agrees that “Bidenomics” has been a success. A recent poll found that only 34 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s economic leadership, compared to his 41-percent overall approval rating. Just 20 percent of voters think the economy is good or excellent, compared to 78 percent who say it is only fair or poor, according to another survey.
A third recent poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans think the economy is worse now than in 2020, when the pandemic started in the U.S.
Many pundits attribute the public’s discontent to ignorance or partisanship. As Jacobin recently noted, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough cited the increase in the country’s economic productivity to suggest that “America is doing just fine,” while New York Times columnist Paul Krugman blamed partisan bias for the “huge gaps between what people say about the economy and both what the data says and what they say about their own experience.”
If there’s good news, it’s that financial hardship fell below 38 percent for the first time since last April — though the latest figure is still higher than any point in 2020 or 2021.
In August 2021, there were 19 million fewer people in financial distress than when Biden entered office. The food-insecure population had dropped by more than six million.
The result? The number of people in financial distress increased by 29 million and the food-insecure population grew by 6 million from September 2021 to September 2022. Just when people needed extra help, existing assistance was taken away.
But Biden and Pelosi then reneged on their pledge and insisted the bills be passed independently, effectively dooming the welfare bill. Progressive lawmakers resisted for a while, but eventually gave up their leverage. The House-passed version still contained a formidable $2.2 trillion November 2021, but by the time the Senate had approved and renamed it the Inflation Reduction Act, it was worth just $437 billion.
I’m not American so I don’t understand the finer details but being worse off financially in a global recession, or close to recession depending on who you ask, isn’t surprising.
Every country is doing pretty shit financially now.
Yes, but we in the US we spend most of that money in the military. Just look at Russia-Ukraine, we are keeping the war going instead of starting peace talks.
If you pay attention to where the money is going you can see that it is not effecting the wealthy, infact it is helping them as always, while the rest of the world is in shite.
The US has a lot of influence in the world, we need to raise our standards because the status quo only prolongs the suffering of the people.
Many countries are seeing a rise in strikes and riots, they are not happy with the world as it is.
Thank you for the reply!
Not really. The money is going to American workers producing military hardware. Most of that is the US upgrading to new equipment and giving away the old for a low price.
This sounds like right wing fox news style nonsense IMO.
When an authoritarian dictator invades a foreign country, there is one giant overwhelming lesson about what happens when others act passively or appease the criminal. This simple fact should slap anyone a hundred miles down the road for suggesting appeasement is a sound policy. This only ends with the end if Putin, much like the Nazis only ended with the end of Hitler. Anything less will result in WW3 as a guaranteed outcome. It will be more one sided. The entire Russian GDP is less than just the state of Texas. But it will be nuclear and era ending, likely with the majority of surviving humanity in the southern hemisphere.
If anything, we should be giving Ukraine absolutely anything they want right now. Let them win before we have to go over there and start dying to stop Putin somewhere halfway across Europe. Putin has proven he will never stop trying to conquer. He is the new Hitler. He keeps power by force and what he has called ‘convenient idiots’ that follow whatever misinformation they are given. It is a propaganda misdirection scheme to talk about things out of context like saying military spending in Ukraine is somehow on the US tax payer. This is completely wrong and intended to provoke people that can’t look at an issue and think for longer than the headline.