The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the first time ever last week, and Biden World took a victory lap. As always with Democrats, it was a bait and switch.
The Wall Street Journal buried the lede in its coverage of the Dow over the weekend. “Adjusted for inflation, [American household] net worth was up just 0.7% through Biden’s first three years, compared with 16% through Trump’s first three years,” the Journal wrote in the final sentence of its report. The Journal’s reporting did, however, produce the most epic chart of President Joe Biden’s entire term in office, showing the disastrous failure of Bidenomics in real time.
My goodness pic.twitter.com/wwjxvQSv4a
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) May 19, 2024
While it’s good news that the Dow is doing well, stocks are only part of a household’s wealth. Net worth is a much better metric, taking all assets, including stocks, bonds, cash and property into account, and subtracting debts.
In nominal value, the Trump and Biden years saw relatively similar growth rates in household net worth (although Trump still leads with a 23% rate of growth compared to Biden’s 19%). Biden will continue to campaign on that, just as he touted the Dow’s performance. But what the Democrats won’t ever mention is the inflation-adjusted side of household growth, which shows Trump’s economy booming while Biden’s lags under or just-above water for much of his presidency.
It’s pretty ironic that Biden is now relegated to touting the stock market as the bellwether of his economic success. Democrats love to bash the right for touting stock market gains as just a bump for the rich. “Throughout this crisis, Donald Trump has been almost singularly focused on the stock market, the Dow and Nasdaq. Not you. Not your families,” Biden said at a campaign rally back in 2020.
He kept up the same line in the early days of his administration as well. “Unlike his predecessor, President Biden does not look at the stock market as a means by which to judge the economy,” a White House spokesman told CNN in 2022.
But now Biden World has nothing else to fall back on.
“This is great news for Americans’ retirement accounts and another sign of confidence in America’s economy,” Biden tweeted out Thursday in response to the Dow’s new high-water mark . “I’m building an economy from the middle out and bottom up – and our investments are making a difference.”
Yet these “investments” are doing the greatest harm to average Americans’ net worth. In truth, Biden is being more honest now than he was on the campaign trail. The stock market isn’t just for rich people and corporations. Hundreds of millions of Americans have their life savings and retirement accounts tied up in the stock market one way or another. They might not see dividends on a quarterly basis, but their long-term wealth — and more importantly, the wealth of their children and grandchildren — is linked to stock performance. But these gains mean nothing if they’re eaten away by inflation, which is exactly what happened under Biden’s watch.
Biden’s “investments,” the so-called Build Back Better and Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal pumped trillions of dollars into the American economy. They were ostensibly meant to tackle real problems like COVID recovery and the abysmal state of America’s roads and bridges. But COVID was effectively over by the time Build Back Better money hit, economic recovery already well underway by a free market that was once again allowed to operate. Meanwhile, “infrastructure” in Democrat-speak, was revealed to largely be a euphemism for climate change. These trillions in unnecessary spending devasted the value of the dollar, making whatever financial growth Americans experienced evaporate as soon as materialized.
Biden World and the corporate press will tell you that inflation is coming down. While it’s true the inflation rate is cooling (thanks to interest rate hikes, which breed their own form of economic misery), inflation is cumulative— it’s the year-on-year rate that matters. And since Biden took office in 2021, inflation is up by nearly 20%.
That’s not even the worst of it, according to calculations by FOX Business. Inflation for everyday costs often exceeds the overall rate. Grocery prices are up by over 21% since Biden took office, while housing costs are up over 18%. Energy prices are up by a whopping 38.4%. For a typical middle class household, these expenses will make up the vast bulk of your budget. It’s no wonder household wealth has not grown when such an enormous bulk of money must go to just staying afloat.
Biden will continue to lie with statistics in the hopes that it will get him across the finish line in November. But economic pessimism persists as Americans have little faith that he can right the ship. There’s only so much Biden can do to convince a struggling family that their finances are great.