LARRY KUDLOW: Biden's big government socialism has turned a booming economy into a bust

Oops! Biden did it again, another major untruth regarding the economy in his Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month. As E.J. Antoni fact-checked in the Committee to Unleash Prosperity Hotline: Biden's claim is that "real income for the bottom half of earners is up by 3.4% since I took office." 

I know that presidents don't lie, so I'll just call this an incorrect assertion, a massive leap into heavy cognitive dissonance or, how about, a new Bottomless Pinocchio. The facts under Biden are this: the bottom 25% of income earners have seen their real incomes fall by 2.3%, while the second income quartile has fallen 3.9%. 

These are data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and, indeed, over the course of the Biden presidency, average weekly earnings adjusted for inflation have fallen 2.1% overall for the entire workforce. This measure of collapsing worker incomes has declined 26 consecutive months. Nothing like this has ever happened before. 

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This is why Mr. Biden's economic policy approval has fallen as much as take-home worker pay has dropped. In the latest Democracy Institute poll, Joe Biden's economic approval rating crashed to 26%. 

Other polls corroborate his decline and I want to point out that a number of presidential prediction models, especially the Professor Ray Fair model at Yale, relies heavily on after-inflation measures of worker pay. 

Another key measure which has similarly dropped under Biden is real disposable income, that measures worker pay after inflation and after taxes. Also, Mr. Biden brags continuously that he has curbed inflation. True enough, inflation has come down from a peak of nearly 10% to currently around 5%. 

5% is a very big inflation number, however. It’s over twice the Federal Reserve's 2% target and, in fact, during the entire Biden presidency, CPI has increased 15.6% with energy prices rising 31.2% and grocery prices rising 19.7%. 

Meanwhile, the economy has sagged, badly. In Mr. Biden's first full year, that is 2022, the economy increased by less than 1%. Over the last 5 quarters, or 15 months, the economy has grown by barely 1%. The second quarter ending in June will probably come in about the same. Remember Mr. Biden inherited a 6.5% growth rate with roughly 1.5% inflation from his predecessor, Donald Trump. 

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Essentially, Biden's big government socialism has turned a booming economy into a bust. Voters know this. So do the roughly 160 million people in the civilian workforce. All of Mr. Biden's untruths not withstanding, his re-election prospects are dismal. 

That is one reason why he has ordered his Justice Department to throw Former President Trump into jail, so Mr. Trump will be prevented from running for president against Biden. Just like Biden's phony income numbers, his corrupt Justice Department is fooling nobody. 

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the June 19, 2023, edition of "Kudlow."