"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command," wrote George Orwell in his classic dystopian novel, 1984. It was a lesson that the Republican Party has learned well.

A recent poll pertaining to whose economic approach is preferred by American voters --- Donald Trump's or Kamala Harris's --- suggests that we remain in the midst of an Orwellian moment driven by GOP disinformation and the mainstream media's inability --- or disinterest --- in countering it. But, really, it's not particularly difficult if one tries.

As the business magazine Fortune described in early 2021, Donald Trump left office with "the worst jobs records since Herbert Hoover". Before that, in late 2020, a U.S. House Budget Committee report noted that Trump's mishandling of COVID had been an "epic failure" that "resulted in thousands of avoidable deaths and the most severe economic crisis in a generation...[S]mall businesses across the country [were] closing their doors for good, families [were] facing hunger and eviction, and millions of Americans [were] still having to make the impossible choice between their health and a paycheck."

The Biden administration, largely as the result of legislation passed before the MAGA Cult barely gerrymandered its way to a do-nothing House majority during the 2022 midterm, produced the fastest economic recovery and lowest inflation rate on the globe, as compared to all other advanced nations. Biden's economic record includes the "two strongest years of job growth in history", the creation of nearly 11 million new jobs, including "750,000 new manufacturing jobs", and, at 3.5%, "the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years." Where Trump never fulfilled his oft-repeated promise to create infrastructure projects, the Biden administration finally delivered, by making "infrastructure investments in all 50 States, D.C., territories and throughout Tribal Nations."

As we recently reported, during her swift-moving, upbeat campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris has advanced immensely popular economic policies. Yet, according to a report on a head-scratching 3-day Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between Aug. 23 and Aug. 25, 2024, "former President Trump's approach to the economy and employment was preferred by 43% of registered voters, as compared to only 40%, who preferred Harris's approach."

The Orwellian misinformation leading to such a polling result can be attributed, in no small part, to an epic mainstream media failure to adequately cover the Biden administration's stellar economic accomplishments. More directly the answer can be found in a recent book authored by Steve Benen, longtime blogger and producer of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, entitled Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past. In it, Benen notes that, for a significant percentage of the electorate, Trump's fictions have simply displaced reality. Many Americans have been duped by a brazen collective and organized effort by Trump, Congressional Republicans and the right-wing media echo chamber to rewrite recent history...

Trump didn't create a robust economy, grow jobs or keep prices low

As Benen observes, whenever Democrats point to the disastrous economic numbers during the Trump administration, Republicans not only use COVID as an excuse, but also build upon the 45th President's Orwellian claims that, during his first three years in office, "our economy [was] better than it had been in many decades", and "we are breaking all jobs and Economic Records."

Using Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a metric, Benen details a compelling case that the U.S. economy fared better during the last three years of the Obama administration than it did during the first three years of the Trump administration. "In the seventh year of the Obama presidency, Americans experienced the strongest economic growth in a decade," Benen accurately observed.

Benen notes that "during the final three-years of the Obama presidency, the economy created 8 million jobs. During the first three years of the Trump administration, the economy created 6.4 million." Yet, prior to the pandemic, Trump claimed he was "the greatest jobs producer God ever created."

Trump's wild jobs exaggeration, Benen explains, prompted former President Barack Obama to offer these remarks during a 2020 campaign rally for the Biden-Harris ticket in Miami:

The fact that job growth continued at a lower rate under Trump than it did during the last three years of the Obama administration in no way establishes that the continued job growth was in any way related to Trump's economic policies. "Correlation does not imply causation."

Today's inflation is a global phenomenon brought on first by COVID-induced supply chain disruptions and then by corporate greed. As a result of Biden administration policies, the U.S. rate of inflation is now the lowest amongst the world's leading economies.

Yet, during the Republican National Convention, the GOP conveniently ignored this hard fact in order to blame Democrats for today's high prices. Republicans also conveniently ignored the vital distinction between inflation and "greedflation" --- monopoly price-gouging that, as we recently noted, Biden, Harris and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) seek to curtail via anti-trust litigation and regulation.

The distinction between inflation and "greedflation" was recently highlighted when, during an ongoing antitrust trial against a giant corporate grocery merger, Kroeger's Senior Director for Pricing, admitted under oath that the retail grocery behemoth had engaged in price-gouging by raising prices far beyond the level of inflation.

Moreover, part of the Trump/GOP claim that the Biden-Harris administration is responsible for inflated prices is the assumption that Trump's economic policies somehow ushered in an era of low prices.That, of course, begs the question: What economic policies?

During an Aug. 29 interview, CNN's Dana Bash, pointing to the Harris/Walz campaign theme, "We're Not Going Back", asked:

Harris' answer relates to the incoming Biden administration's aggressive response to both the economic and biological crises they faced at the beginning of their term, as exacerbated by Trump's epic failure to competently and honestly deal with the COVID pandemic. It also suggests that Trump's mismanagement of COVID --- mismanagement that experts contend were the source of 40% of US COVID deaths --- should not be grounds for giving Trump a mulligan with respect to the pandemic's massive hit on the economy and jobs.

But the Vice President's answer did not address Bash's fallacious assumption that the lower prices that existed when Trump was in office were the product of his administration's policies.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains a Consumer Price Index (CPI) that measures "the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of goods and services."

According to the Consumer Price Index For Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), during the last three years of the Obama administration, average prices for urban wage earners rose by 2.32%. During the first three years of the Trump administration, however, prices for urban wage earners increased 5.74% --- more than double the CPI-W increase during the last three years of the Obama administration.

The only two major accomplishments during the Trump administration were tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy that increased the national debt by $8.4 trillion and packing the Supreme Court with right wing ideologues. Neither he nor Republicans can point to any policy advanced by Trump while he was in office that served to improve the lives of working and middle class Americans.

Given their success to date --- success facilitated by the mainstream media's failure to adequately cover the Biden administration's accomplishments --- there can be little doubt that MAGA Republicans will just keep lying about Trump's economics. It will be up to the Harris/Walz campaign, their supporters and alternative media journalists not only to set the economic record straight but also to shame mainstream media pundits into providing the electorate with the accurate information needed to make an informed electoral decision on November 5th.

UPDATE, 9/4/24: The Wall Street investment firm, Goldman Sachs, not exactly a bastion of progressive policies, predicts that the U.S. economy, as measured by the GDP, would take a hit if Trump and Republicans win the 2024 election. This is based upon the firm's analysis of the impact of Trump's proposed tariffs and proposed mass deportations. By contrast, Goldman Sachs believes that the economy would be boosted by a Democratic sweep and enactment of the Harris/Walz economic agenda.

UPDATE, 9/26/24: The Harris/Walz campaign released a 76-page policy booklet [PDF] that lays out their plan for creating an "opportunity economy" in detail. It not only reflects their intent to inject anti-trust competition and an improvement of supply chains, but also contains a specific proposal for Congress to pass "a first-ever [national] ban on price gouging" in which unscrupulous corporations "exploit times of crisis to excessively and indefensibly increase their profit margins."

                 

Article Categories: CNN, MSNBC, DNC, Mainstream Media Failure, Dept. of Justice, Barack Obama, RNC, Joe Biden, Economy, Rachel Maddow, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Election 2020, Tim Walz, Election 2024, Election 2022, George Orwell, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Steve Benen