This past month a poll held by ABC and the Washington Post with a 37 year history asked Americans if they were better or worse off in the two years since Biden entered the White House. If you were to ask Biden this question, you would be regaled with a flurry of great news about a fantastic economic recovery, epic jobs numbers, falling inflation and a dropping deficit. When you ask actual average citizens, you get a much different reply.
According to the ABC/Post poll, Americans say they are worse off than they have ever been, with the most negative data in the history of the survey. Over 40% of respondents indicated their financial situation was worse under Biden. Only 16% of people said they were better off. Not only that, but 60% of Democrats polled said they did NOT want Joe Biden as their candidate in 2024, and 62% of all people polled said they would be disappointed or even angry if Biden remained in the White House for a second term. This is astounding.
How does one reconcile this reality with the claims made by Joe Biden on the economy? If this is the “greatest economic recovery ever” then why are so many Americans in financial misery?
The number of lies surrounding Biden’s economic platform are too many to count, but I will try to go through the key arguments that the White House is promoting these days and outline why these claims are manipulative or outright fraudulent. Let’s get started…
Record Jobs Creation?
Biden and his team are quick to suggest that data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates an incredible jobs recovery which he is happy to take credit for. “You don’t have a recession when you have 500,000 jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told ABC’s “Good Morning America” program on Monday. “What I see is a path in which inflation is declining significantly and the economy is remaining strong,” Yellen added.
This is coming from the same woman who denied for years that inflation was real and a threat to our financial system. The same woman that reluctantly admitted to inflation only after it hit 40 year highs. So, keep in mind that Yellen’s track record indicates she is either an idiot or a liar.
Also, these kinds of statements are made while deliberately ignoring the context and details of the situation. Over 25 million+ jobs were lost on Biden’s watch as he aggressively pushed for national covid lockdowns. These lockdowns were useless in stopping the spread of the virus, but they were very effective at killing the economy.
Many conservative red states defied Biden, Fauci and the CDC and reopened after a few months when it became clear that covid was not a threat to the vast majority of people. Blue states languished in lockdowns and irrational fear for much longer. Only recently have most US states backed away from the covid hysteria and so jobs are returning. 25 million+ were lost, and 12 million have been recovered. Hardly anything to brag about, but when you look at it as if the lockdowns never happened, it might be impressive.
Beyond the return of jobs lost during the lockdowns, there is also the issue of around $8 trillion+ in stimulus in less than two years of pandemic response. The lockdowns could not have happened without covid checks and PPP loans, and the covid stimulus helped directly trigger the inflation avalanche that had been building for years. Part of this process happened under Trump’s watch, to be sure. However, it was Biden and the leftists that tried to keep the mandates and lockdowns going even when the data showed they were useless.
With $8 trillion in fiat pumped directly into the system, retail and service industries exploded in 2021 as people rushed to buy goods. Prices exploded, too, because supply could not meet demand. The problem is that the jobs created during this event are a temporary condition of inflation, not a natural result of a recovering economy. In other words, Biden’s jobs market is an illusion built on fiat. I predict we will see considerable job losses this year as savings accumulated from covid stimulus run out and as consumer credit runs dry.
Then, there is the issue of potentially fake or exaggerated BLS jobs data. Only last year the Philly Fed had to revise and refute White House labor gains and cut over 1 million jobs from their stats in the process. This is a massive discrepancy. Though it’s impossible to prove at this stage, I suspect that there is a concerted agenda to lie about employment numbers, either to make Biden look good, or to facilitate an excuse for the continuance of interest rate hikes into economic weakness.
If the BLS numbers are accurate, then why is there a record number of Americans worse off under Biden? One, the jobs being created are low wage. Two, the numbers are fake. Three, inflation is so high that wages cannot keep up with the increase in prices.
Falling Inflation?
If we calculate inflation according to the standards set during the last stagflation crisis in the 1970s and early 1980’s, then the real inflation rate is closer to 15%. Official CPI according to the new way of calculation is 6.4%. Did inflation fall recently? Yes, but not because of Biden.
The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates to nearly 5%. Keep in mind that this is after keeping rates at near zero for around 14 years, and they are expected to continue to climb to a possible 6% or more this year. Higher rates mean far less lending and far less spending by consumers and the government. They also mean that corporate stock buybacks which originally relied on cheap overnight loans from the Fed are going to slowly die out, causing stock markets to fall. The most obvious consequence of this trend will be mass job losses as companies cut costs.
Falling Budget Deficit?
Again, this has nothing to do with Biden. He is trying to spend more and add more to the budget through his “Inflation Reduction Act”. Despite his many promises, he is not trying to reduce the budget. He will be FORCED to do this, however, by tightening fiscal policy.
Why is the deficit falling? Because the Fed is raising interest rates and this makes it more expensive for the government to borrow and spend. Higher interest rates raise the federal government’s borrowing costs and future interest payments on the national debt. As rates rise government programs must curb spending – meaning they are forced to reduce the budget deficit instead of spending money they don’t have.
The Reality
US retail sales just witnessed a steep decline through the end of 2022 and the holiday season, indicating that the effects of covid stimulus are well and truly over. Manufacturing tumbled as 2022 closed, defying Biden’s assertions that he is bringing back domestic production. US imports of goods have also tumbled and shipping is down across the board, yet another sign that the economy is stalling.
Intermittent spikes in retail sales have occurred, as we saw in January, but so has credit card debt, suggesting that consumers are now leaning on credit in order to cover increased costs triggered by inflation. Retail sales are not increasing, just the prices and credit expenditures. In fact, polls show 33% of Americans say it will take them at least 2 years to pay off their credit card debts, and 50% of Americans say they need their credit cards just to cover normal essential living expenses. 45% of people said they had to take on more debt during the pandemic.
The Tech sector is starting mass layoffs right now and may be a canary in the coal mine for what is about to happen to the rest of the jobs market this year. And, inflation remains high enough that 56% of Americans say they cannot keep up with the cost of living, while 77% are worried about their future financial prospects.
This information does not jive with Biden’s story at all. There is no recovery, we are in the midst of a stagflation crisis with elements of a growing recession. I believe 2023 will be the year that the recovery narrative collapses, but the government under Biden will seek to hide the implosion for as long as possible.
Article cross-posted from Alt-Market.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Well, um, d’uh. Is there ANYTHING having to do with Biden or his administration that is NOT built on deception? Other than his stated desire to gut the Bill of Rights? Devoting an entire article to a subject as obvious as “water is wet” seems a bit onanistic.
Anybody who actually lives and works in America knows Poopy-pants’s economy is total Bullshit.
“Why is the deficit falling? Because the Fed is raising interest rates and this makes it more expensive for the government to borrow and spend. Higher interest rates raise the federal government’s borrowing costs and future interest payments on the national debt. As rates rise government programs must curb spending – meaning they are forced to reduce the budget deficit instead of spending money they don’t have.”
This makes no sense at all. The deficit is the difference between govt. Expenditures and govt. Revenue. I’m not aware of any government programs curbing spending, and if they did so to offset rising interest payments, that would have zero effect on the deficit.
The deficit might be falling because of lowered social services costs as covid related costs fall. But like everything Biden has claimed…first the jacked up the costs of everything and then he uses his exploded numbers to claim getting back to normal and regaining the lost ground is progress of some kind.
All I know is they used 2008 to massively explode the Government. And now they have used Covid to massively explode the Government. This has always been the Democrat Plan…use fear and crisis to blow up the budget and then claim a new baseline.
We’re in serious trouble as Social Security/Medicare for Baby Boomers is going to be the next crisis.
Brandon’s only in the WH, because the gop let the Dems steal elections.