While President Joe Biden touted job creation and other apparent economic successes of his “Bidenomics” policies in a Labor Day speech, surveys showed that a growing majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and that most say the economy has deteriorated over the president’s tenure.
The president talked up his economic policies in a speech to union workers in Philadelphia on Monday, while two separate surveys showed that a majority of Americans believe the economy has gotten worse over the past two years.
“This Labor Day we’re celebrating jobs, good-paying jobs, jobs you can raise a family on, union jobs,” President Biden said in a speech to union workers, which follows news that U.S. employers added 187,000 jobs in August.
President Biden went on to highlight his Bidenomics plan that he said created 13.5 million new jobs while taking repeated jabs at former President Donald Trump.
“When the last guy was here, he looked at the world from Park Avenue,” President Biden said. “I look at it from Scranton, Pennsylvania, I look at it from Claymont, Delaware.”
Critics have argued that President Biden’s job creation figure of 13.5 million is exaggerated because a large proportion of that number was simply people returning to work after temporary job cuts at the height of the pandemic, and that the president shouldn’t take credit for the rebound.
“During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs were created, and by contrast, during my first 30 months in office we created 4.9 million new jobs,” President Trump said in an Aug. 5 speech in South Carolina, in which he pledged to “reverse Bidenomics and restore the trajectory I created toward increasing this country’s financial prosperity.”
The Trump campaign later told PolitiFact, a fact-checking website, that the 2.1 million figure—as opposed to President Biden’s claim of 13.5 million—was derived by excluding workers returning from pandemic layoffs from the job creation count.
Meanwhile, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump presidential campaign, pushed back on President Biden’s attack on President Trump’s record in remarks to CNBC.
“President Trump produced a booming economic recovery, and record low unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and women,” Mr. Cheung told the news organization.
“Joe Biden is the destroyer of America’s jobs and continues to fuel runaway inflation with reckless big government spending. President Trump’s vision for America’s economic revival is lower taxes, bigger paychecks, and more jobs for American workers,” he added.
Biden’s Economy Deteriorating, Most Say
While President Biden was in Philadelphia discussing his economic policies, a new survey from The Wall Street Journal showed that a majority (58 percent) of U.S. voters said the economy has gotten worse over the past two years.
Around 75 percent of Americans said that inflation is headed in the wrong direction, the survey also showed, which dovetails with the latest government data that a key inflation gauge favored by the Federal Reserve indicated price pressures accelerating.
At the same time, 61 percent of adults said they were living paycheck to paycheck as of July, according to a separate survey from personal finance site PYMNTS and LendingClub, an online lender. That’s up from 59 percent who said the same thing around the same time last year.
Higher-earning households are also feeling the financial squeeze, with 44 percent of those earning over $100,000 per year saying they were living paycheck to paycheck. That figure was 78 percent among those earning under $50,000, and 65 percent for those earning between $50,000 and $100,000, the survey showed.
Other recent surveys indicate that Americans continue to feel the pain of high prices.
According to a Bankrate survey in July, 72 percent of Americans don’t feel financially secure. Among them, 63 percent say that high inflation is making it hard for them to be financially comfortable.
Another survey by Bankrate in June found that 68 percent of Americans are saving less for unexpected situations because of inflation.
Inflation Forces Typical Household to Spend $709 More per Month
Recently, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi calculated that the typical American household was spending a whopping $709 more per month than it was two years ago because of high inflation.
Mr. Zandi’s calculations came in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) that was remarking on the latest government data on inflation, the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
Inflation, as measured by CPI, came in at 3.2 percent in year-over-year terms in July, up from 3 percent in June and the first increase in the annualized pace of inflation in about a year.
While that’s down from the 9.1 percent peak in June 2022, many consumers continue to reel from the persistently elevated price pressures of the past few years.
“The high inflation of the past two-plus years has done lots of economic damage. Due to the high inflation, the typical household spent $202 more in a July than they did a year ago to buy the same goods and services. And they spent $709 more than they did two years ago,” Mr. Zandi wrote in his post.
While Mr. Zandi characterized July’s inflation numbers as “great,” Republicans saw his calculations as yet more proof that President Joe Biden’s economic policies have been fanning the flames of inflation.
“Bidenomics is costing the average family over $700 more per month!” the Wisconsin Republican Party posted on social media.
In its effort to quash inflation, the Federal Reserve has hiked rates since March 2022 at its most aggressive pace since the 1980s.
Even though the pace of inflation has slowed from the 9.1 percent peak in June 2022, experts say progress has been limited.
While the headline pace of CPI inflation came in at 3.2 percent year over year, so-called core inflation—which strips out food and energy from the calculation—came in at 4.7 percent.
The core readings, rather than the headline numbers, are what the Federal Reserve pays attention to most closely when assessing progress in trying to bring inflation down to its target of around 2 percent.
“The decline in core inflation readings from year-ago levels has been much less pronounced and at 4.7 percent remains well above the 2 percent target,” Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
Also, the core Personal Consumption Expenditures price index—which is the gauge the Fed relies on most heavily to measure progress against its 2 percent inflation target—rose to 4.2 percent, up from 4.1 percent in June, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).
“Even after a months-long holding pattern to start the year, core inflation readings are showing only modest progress in the right direction,” Mr. McBride said.
About the Author
Tom Ozimek is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times. He has a broad background in journalism, deposit insurance, marketing and communications, and adult education. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.