Numbers Don’t Lie, but People Do

Economic data have been full of tricks and distortions for nearly four years now.

The federal government has been releasing a large amount of economic data this week. It is full of tricks and distortions meant to benefit the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris. Americans, however, have endured the ugly reality of the Biden-Harris years and are unlikely to be fooled by this numbers game.

The info dump includes “advance estimate[s] of Q3 GDP growth, non-farm payrolls, the unemployment rate, and JOLTS job openings,” plus “the ISM Manufacturing PMI, CB consumer confidence, the PCE inflation report, and personal spending and income figures,” as  Trading Economics  reports.

Much that data consists of estimates, and the rest of it is subject to the economically negative corrections in which the Biden administration has continually engaged. Positive economic numbers, released with expressions of joy and credit for the great wisdom of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, are later quietly revised downward into obviously bad news.

By that point in time, of course, there are always new numbers, released with expressions of joy and credit for the great wisdom of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that distract from the depressing corrections of the older numbers. In addition, the new numbers are presented as gloriously large improvements on those downwardly revised older numbers, making it appear that the economy is continually getting better and better, even though comparing excessively rosy advance numbers with accurately dismal older numbers is obviously unjustifiable.

This game of three card monte with economic data is clearly intended to fool the public. The nation’s legacy media are eager participants in the deception, to the extent that they are not ignorant of the game—the latter of which is unjustifiable for any supposedly professional reporter or commentator. The people of the United States, however, have to buy groceries, clothes, gas, automobile repairs, and the like, and they have to pay every month for housing, electricity, water, whatever runs their HVAC systems, and so on, and they want to go to restaurants, movies, and other entertainments to the extent possible—for all of which they find themselves paying much higher prices than what they were shelling out three years ago.

Joyful claims that inflation has slowed—as indeed it has in the past year—do not bring prices down to where they were before. It is true that many people have received pay raises in the past couple of years, which can help compensate for the innumerable price hikes in everything they want to purchase. Those pay raises, however, are given in lower-valued dollars, and for most people they do not match the full effect of inflation since January 2021 even in nominal-dollar terms, let alone after adjusting for inflation.

Meanwhile, income taxes, sales taxes, use taxes, property taxes, and a multitude of other excise and service taxes all rise as prices, incomes, housing values, and the bases for all sorts of other taxable items rise in dollar terms though not in reality. That makes Bidenflation an enormous tax increase at all levels of government, a stealth tax of incredible proportions. This immense multi-tax increase has not receded, as the prices of the things to which the taxes apply remain largely at their new, higher levels.

Meanwhile, the massive increase in government borrowing the Biden-Harris administration and Congress indulged in during 2021 and 2022 (with Harris casting the tiebreaking votes on massive spending bills), and the Republicans’ refusal to use their small majority in the House of Representatives to force the White House to make cuts in 2023 and 2024, created the abrupt rise in price inflation and impelled the Federal Reserve to slam the brakes on the economy last year to slow the devaluation of the dollar.

That made things even tougher for most Americans, as businesses turned to hiring immigrants whom they could pay lower wages, resulting in net losses of employment among native-born American workers.

The dismal result of this miserable game of spend, tax, inflate, stealth-tax, kill jobs for native-born Americans, and repeat has been a decrease in wealth and real income for the great majority of Americans. “The bad news is that over the Biden presidency, earnings are still about 1.3% BELOW inflation,”  Unleash Prosperity  reports. “It provides further evidence that wage growth under Biden hasn’t kept up with inflation, resulting in a 1.3 percent loss in real earnings.”

The consumer price index has increased by 21 percent since January 2021.

In a separate item,  Unleash Prosperity  reproduces a chart from University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan which shows real employee compensation per adult in the United States during the Biden-Harris years has averaged 5 percent below the trendline established by President Donald Trump and was even worse than that for several quarters:

All this economic decline, which Unleash Prosperity calls “Biden’s underperformance,” happened while government agencies were proclaiming, month after month, that things have been continually improving.

Politicians, reporters, and others with media access may be fooled by this numerical sleight of hand or pretend to believe the illusion, but the American people know the reality of their experiences. Let’s hope the data we receive on Election Night will accurately reflect that.

(A version of this article appeared at Blaze Media.)