By Mark Sumner for Daily Kos
Daily Kos Staff
On Thursday, President Joe Biden was in Wisconsin to announce nearly $5 billion in new infrastructure spending as a result of the infrastructure bill he signed in 2021. The legislation is responsible for more than 44,000 projects in all 50 states. And no matter how many times Republicans try to take credit for a bill they almost all voted against, these improvements and the jobs they bring are all due to Biden and the Democrats who pushed it through in the House and Senate.
Also on Thursday, the Commerce Department stunned pundits by reporting that the United States’ GDP growth in the final quarter of 2023 was a shockingly good 3.3%. Despite predictions of a recession that seem to have been repeated every quarter for the past two years, growth is strong and shows no signs of slacking. Under Biden, America has surged out of the recession created by Donald Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and has emerged with an economy that even Fox News can’t stop gushing about.
As more bridges go up and the national economy booms, the nation just keeps adding more new jobs, including 216,000 in December. Overall, the economy added 2.7 million jobs in 2023, keeping the unemployment rate at just 3.7%. That’s down from a pandemic-induced peak of 14.8% under Trump.
And that is just the start of the good news.
Dragging America out of the trough that Trump enabled and keeping businesses alive during the pandemic took a heavy level of investment from the government. It was no surprise when inflation began creeping up in 2021 and reached 9.1% in 2022. Over half of that number may have been due to greedy corporations who took advantage of the pandemic to pad their bottom lines, but that didn’t stop it from hurting consumers.
But in the past year, inflation has largely been wrestled under control, ending the year up only 3.9%. There’s still some distance to go to reach the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%. However, 2023 was also a year in which U.S. salaries saw major increases. The average 4.4% increase in pay exceeded inflation for the year and helped consumers regain some of the ground they’d lost in the previous year.
Those salary increases may partially reflect the fact that three major unions reached new agreements with corporations in the past year. The United Auto Workers reached an amazing new agreement with the big three U.S. manufacturers that includes a 25% wage increase over the next four years while promoting the construction of more electric cars and battery plants in the United States. The Writers Guild of America reached an agreement with film and television producers that was termed “exceptional,” and then the actors and crew members protected by SAG-AFTRA followed with another big win for workers that protected their members in a rapidly changing industry threatened by AI.
All those changes were made possible by the most pro-union, pro-labor, pro-worker president since FDR. Biden became the first sitting president to stand on the picket line with workers. It’s little wonder that UAW President Shawn Fain has given Biden a wholehearted endorsement while describing Trump as a “scab.”
And while Trump is telling his audiences that one of his first priorities, if he gets back into the White House, will be to tell the energy sector to “drill, baby, drill,” someone might want to let him know that almost every sector of the energy industry is producing at record levels. Not only are renewables surging under Biden, but the highest level of U.S. oil production in history is happening right now, not under Trump.
The economy’s strength seems to finally be getting through to Americans, despite a media that can’t seem to give up the doom-and-gloom. Americans are now feeling more optimistic about the economy than they have in many months.
And here’s one more little thing: While CEO pay has skyrocketed since America was introduced into conservative “trickle-down” economics, the ratio of pay between CEOs and workers fell slightly in 2022 partly because of the tight labor market, and those union deals are expected to drive this number down more when the results are in for 2023.
Bidenomics isn’t simply working; it’s a wonder.
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