The poverty rate is a crude but effective way of measuring the health of the economy.
The inflation rate and the unemployment rate are added.
If you’re a president running for re-election, you want that number to be as low as possible.
When ronald reagan won re-election, was about 11.4; When he did it George W. Bush was 9; for Barack Obama it was 9.5; and today, when Joe Biden is running for re-election, it is only 7.7.
Biden should easily win re-election.
And that misery index figure doesn’t even begin to reflect the strength of the US economy right now.
There are a zillion positive indicators right now, as the administration folks will be quick to tell you.
The economy has created 13 million jobs since the day of Biden’s inauguration.
According to The Conference Board, a business research firm, American job satisfaction is at its highest level in 36 years.
Household net worth is rising.
On Thursday we learned that the US economy grew at an annualized rate of 2% in the first quarter of this year, well above economists’ expectations, which were around 1.4%.
Best of all, the new prosperity is helping those who have long been left behind.
In the four years of government of donald trumpspending on manufacturing facilities grew 5%.
During the first two years of the Biden administration, that investment more than doubled, creating some 800,000 manufacturing jobs.
This is not mere coincidence.
It is a direct result of Biden’s policies:
The Inflation Reduction Law, with its provisions on green technology, the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act.
He stimulating spending Biden’s administration spiked the inflation rate, but inflation is now lower than in many other developed nations and our economy is stronger.
So Americans should be celebrating.
But it’s not like that.
According to an NBC News poll conducted this month, at least 74% of Americans say the country is going astray.
Gallup’s economic confidence index over the past year has been sharply negative; People haven’t felt this bad about the economy since the throes of the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.
The University of Michigan Consumer Confidence Index is also wildly negative.
Biden’s proval numbers have been hovering around a dangerously low 43% for a year.
As master political analyst Charlie Cook noted in 2020, on average, presidents tend to lose their re-election bids when around 70% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, and they tend to win at least Half of Americans think that.
Why do Americans feel so bad about an economy that is doing so well?
In part, it is inflation.
Things have leveled off recently with inflation falling, but for a while real wages were falling.
Prices for things like gasoline and food are now significantly higher than they were three years ago.
Biden’s people hope that as inflation continues to drop and word spreads, Americans will start to feel better.
But it is not that simple.
It is partly due to media.
According to a recent study, in the last two decades the headlines have been increasingly more negativeconveying anger and fear.
And that transmits bad vibrations to the population.
But the main problem is national psychology.
Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives is nearly four times greater than their satisfaction with the state of the nation.
That is likely because during the Trump era we have suffered a collective moral injury, a collective loss of confidence, a loss of faith in ourselves as a nation.
The United States has suffered two recent periods of national demoralization.
In the 1970s, during Vietnam and WatergateAmericans lost faith in their institutions.
During the Trump era, Americans also lost faith in each other.
Trump supporters converted to the gospel of American carnage, the idea that elite Americans seek to destroy other Americans, that we are on the precipice of disaster.
Opponents of Trump were horrified that their countrymen could support him, disgusted by his rampant immorality, alarmed that their democracy was suddenly in jeopardy.
The anthropologist Raoul Naroll argued that every society has a “moral net“, a cultural infrastructure that exists, mostly unconsciously, in the minds of its members.
The United States is in tatters.
This manifests itself in a loss of national self esteem.
People begin to assume national incompetence.
Fearful and anxious people are quick to perceive the negative aspects of any situation, are hypersensitive to threats, prone to pessimism.
You can’t get people out of that psychological and moral state with statistics and fact sheets.
Biden is going to have to serve as a national guide, not just an administrator.
He has to break out of the protective walls that have been built around him and become the center of attention of the nation, not Trump.
You will have to invent one national history of the 21st century that gives people a sense of coherence and belonging, that we are marching in a clear direction towards a series of concrete objectives.
Good jobs numbers alone won’t cure a dulled national psyche, and right now that’s our biggest problem.
c.2023 The New York Times Company
Source: Clarin
