Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The best way to get published in an elite media outlet is to say that the people were right in thinking things were bad in 2024, and the Democrats were wrong in trying to tell people things were good. Both parts of that line are wrong, but hey, when did outlets like the New York Times ever care about accuracy?
The latest item that really ticked me off on this was a NYT column which included the line:
“After a prolonged period of inflation, with a Biden administration that told Americans not to believe their lying wallets, voters clearly wanted the next president to stabilize the economy and make their cost of living more manageable.”
There have been many others along this line, which I won’t bother list, except to mention one particularly pernicious column: a widely circulated Politico piece by “Eugene Ludwig,” headlined “the voters were right about the economy. The data was wrong.” In fact, just about everything in Ludwig’s piece was wrong, but let’s get back to the NYT.
I would challenge Kristen Soltis Anderson to find any occasion where Biden, or any Democrat, went around saying that things were good. To my mind, they made a big mistake in not emphasizing the unambiguously positive aspects of the Biden-Harris record.
For example, we saw the most rapid real wage growth (wage growth in excess of inflation) for lower paid workers in half a century. We saw much of the wage gap between higher paid and lower paid workers that developed over the prior four decades, disappear in the years since the pandemic. We also saw the smallestBlack-white wage gap ever recorded.
The Biden-Harris recovery also saw the longest period of low unemployment (below 4.0 percent) since the 1960s. We also saw the lowest Black unemployment rate ever recorded and tied for the lowest ever Hispanic unemployment rate.
There also were record rates of new business start-ups, an especially impressive fact given that Trump and the Republicans insisted that Biden and Harris were Marxists, socialists, and/or communists. We also saw an increase of 20 million (one eighth of the workforce) in the number of people who could work from home since the pandemic. This is a benefit that is equivalent to a 10-15 percent increase in pay, as Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell told us in a piece that ran afterthe election.
But Ms. Anderson apparently believes that she has been in direct contact with people’s wallets and knows that all the data pointing to relatively good times are wrong and that people were in fact really hurting. (To be clear, many people are hurting, and we should be doing tons to reverse the upward redistribution of the last forty years, but my comparison is to 2019 when people like Ms. Anderson all said things were good.)
Anderson undoubtedly can point to any number of surveys showing that people felt the economy was bad. Usually, the surveys found that most people thought everyone else was doing awful, but they personally were doing okay. But we can get beyond what people say about the economy, which we know is heavily influenced by partisanship, as well as media reporting, and look at what they do. If we want to hear from people’s pocketbooks that would be the obvious place to look.
The pocketbooks don’t seem to agree with Anderson’s assessment. First, real consumption, that is consumption adjusted for higher prices, was 15.1 percent higher in 2024 than 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. This means that people were on average buying more stuff.
To see what they were spending their money on I looked at real spending on a number of items that most of us would not call necessities. Spending on games, toys, and hobbies increased 59.0 percent over this five-year period. I guess people needed the games to distract themselves from how much they were hurting.
Spending on newspapers and magazines increased by 58.0 percent. That’s great news for those of us who like to write or like to read. Spending on air travel rose 36.4 percent, again not an expense we usually think of as a necessity.
Spending on restaurants rose by 12.7 percent, while spending on fast-food restaurants rose slightly less at 12.5 percent. And spending on hotels and motels increased by 11.6 percent.
Spending can be skewed by more money going to the rich, but did the rich need more money to increase their spending on games and hobbies or newspapers and magazines? That doesn’t seem very plausible. Perhaps putting more money in their pockets got the rich to spend more on restaurants but does that also explain the increase in real spending on fast-food restaurants. Is Elon Musk eating more Big Macs because the value of his Tesla stock has increased?
We do actually have data on consumption by income. There was a recent paperfrom the Fed which found that real consumption rose somewhat faster for high income people, but still found substantial growth in real consumption both for households with incomes below $60,000 a year and for people without college degrees.
Would be wallet whisperer Kristen Soltis Anderson is telling us that the wallets are really hurting, but the wallets don’t act like they were hurting, or at least they didn’t until Donald Trump started yelling about tariffs, and Elon Musk began taking a chainsaw to people’s jobs and benefits. It would be good if news outlets showed a little more skepticism towards people who claim to know about people’s well-being, but have no data to support their claims.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
