Matt Taibbi has a fair piece about the state of the economy and the media’s frustrations that the public isn’t giving Joe Biden more credit for this supposedly unprecedented era of economic growth. Instead of talking to America’s working families who have been raked over the coals for the past four years, the press denigrates them, mocks them, and straight-out tells them they don’t know what they’re talking about. The ‘don’t believe your lying eyes’ line is getting used frequently when the liberal media has nowhere to pivot.
The press has long said, ‘look at the data; we’re good,’ which collapses under the weight of reality when families go to the grocery store, pay rent, car insurance, and buy medicines. Almost half the country says they’re poorer than they were four years ago. And with inflation remaining the monkey on all our backs, whatever effects of this reported growth is cannibalized. Things aren’t good when savings and credit card balances are at historic highs. The latest GDP report sent Bidenomics further into the depths of political purgatory, but the media will remain firm in their ‘you’re just not reading it right’ mode. Has anyone told them that the data can be messed with—this has been true since the first CBO report for Obamacare (via Racket News):
“People are really tying Bidenomics and their perception of the economy to the inflation rate,” said Matt Monday of Morning Consult, in a new Bloomberg story titled, “Biden’s gains against Trump vanish against deep economic pessimism, poll shows.” It’s the latest entrant in an intensifying campaign to describe voters, especially in key electoral swing states, as morons and partisan haters who’ll deny reality itself out of political spite.
This campaign has been weirdly perverse in its mockery. Seattle Times cartoonist David Horsey recently tossed off a visual of the reality-denying swing voter, rendering him as a pudgy, confused hominid in the mode of Monty Python’s duncelike Gumbys.
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When the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago ran “What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data,” I thought the “It’s not me, it’s you” framing had to be ironic, a spoof of these increasingly numerous “perception of the economy” pieces.
Noting that 74% of respondents in a recent poll said they felt inflation in the “past year” was going in the wrong direction, author Greg Ip noted flatly “it’s not true…”
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Yet when they’re not sketched swing voters as cartoon dopes, these “economic pessimism” pieces sooner or later blame the ordinary person for failing to appreciate his or her good fortune. Scripps months ago asked, “Is the economy the issue, or the problem with America’s perception?” In it, they noted that 78% of the country felt “the economy” was going in the wrong direction. “But is it?” the piece asked, stroking its rhetorical chin before adding: “After all, most Americans vote not on statistics, but based on how they feel.”
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They [the media] also won’t grasp that public mistrust usually has less to do with one-time calculations at the supermarket register than with decades of accumulated frustrations about the increasingly numerous aspects of American life that are straight-up scams, or guaranteed income schemes for failure-proofed rich.
For instance: a subtext to the fury about the Columbia University protests this week is the school’s obscene $89,000 tuition. Reeling in soaring tuition checks from guilt-ridden parents in exchange for an (often) neither-very-good-nor-useful education is a gravy train any good student loan activist knows is only possible thanks to myriad crookednesses baked in the system. Between over-availability of federal credit, an extraordinarily punitive job market (requiring degrees even for menial office work, though the same degrees guarantee nothing), the failure of even public universities to pass ballooning endowments back to students as tuition savings, and the historical inability to discharge student debt in bankruptcy (another area where Biden has taken some action), colleges can raise prices forever without either improving their product or worrying about students not earning enough to pay bills.
People aren’t stupid. They’ll read that Pfizer pulled in $58 billion in profits last year, and every time they go to a pharmacy or see a hospital bill, they’ll remember somewhere that these companies benefit from a slew of subsidies, from free R&D to protections from generics and imports.
When they go to an airport on Thanksgiving, they hear an airline rep telling them it now costs $30 for a carry-on. Do they know all the relevant history, that in the 2010s executives at the big four airlines gorged themselves on $43.7 billion in buybacks before demanding and getting, a $50 billion Covid bailout, which in turn resulted in more buybacks, mass layoffs, and even crappier, more dangerous service? No, but they have a good idea they got screwed somewhere, and occasionally even hear a politician admit it. “Buyer’s remorse,” said DC congresswoman Eleanor Norton, characterizing the airline rescue she supported.
A lot of “pessimistic” voters struggle to pass credit checks just to rent an apartment, but see at the same time that a big bank in America can buy the world’s most toxic subprime company (as Bank of America did with Countrywide) or promote murder and mayhem by evading money-laundering (as HSBC did by serving drug cartels), and they not only get away with it, but get rewarded with fifteen years of low-to-zero interest rate monetary policies.
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And Taibbi doesn’t direct his fire only at the media—Trump’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES ACT) was the first salvo in the massive inflation spike we’ve seen. The exception is that Trump proved he could build an economy; Biden has struggled. To boot, the first glimpse of liberal America’s arrogance on this issue was when they first tried to gaslight us into thinking these inflation hikes were “transitory.”
With nowhere to go, inflation remaining high, and a bad GDP report, the media opts to mock the American voter because how dare real Americans who have a better grasp of life push back on what we say. The former Rolling Stone editor notes that this isn’t some exercise in envy—Americans like seeing people making money. It’s why we never had a successful socialist, redistributionist party in this country. But, as he put it, “When people have no chance at all, and money is transferred by the trillion straight from the Fed to accounts of the idiot rich while hardworking people are asked to pay for it in taxes and inflation, they tend to get pissed off.”
He adds, “The basics—school, medicine, doctor visits, a home, retirement—have become less and less attainable, while politicians keep waving through giant handouts for the scummiest layers of American society.” These "layers" are usually the biggest allies and contributors to the media and the political class.
And some dense people wonder why Donald Trump hasn’t gone away. This system is pure fertilizer for populism.
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