18 April 2024
Even Deep History is Not That Far Away
If we go back 150 lifetimes - assuming 40 year life expectancies - we go back 6,000 years, which takes us to around 4000 BC.
4000 BC corresponds roughly to the early Bronze Age, a time when human societies were increasingly using metalworking, developing urban centers, and establishing complex social structures in various parts of the world.
How far back is that?
Well, Mesopotamia was just in the Copper Age, leading into the Early Bronze Age. Mesopotamia, particularly in the region of modern-day Iraq, was seeing the rise of complex societies. These groups would eventually develop into the Sumerian civilization, one of the world's first known civilizations, which arose in the later parts of the 4th millennium BCE. No dynasties had yet emerged in what would become ancient Egypt, China, or the Indus Valley.
The people you know represent enough lifetimes to take us back to pre-history.
What do I take from that? Even deep history is not that far away - fewer generations than the number of people we know.
05 April 2024
Time to Move Beyond Blase to Bedazzled at Biden's Policies and the Biden Economy
The Biden presidency is setting a bar for economic performance that has never before been hit and is unlikely to be matched again. This is not by chance.
A few things to remember about Biden.
1. Obama gave him responsibility for leading the 2008 Great Recession recovery efforts. Obama was opposed at every step of his presidency and in the economic recovery, with unemployment persistently and depressingly high, his recovery plan was one more defined by austerity than stimulus. The unemployment rate in his first term averaged 9%. That was an extraordinarily painful period for Americans that - unsurprisingly - created extremists on both side of the political divide, from the Occupy Wall Street crowd who denounced markets and banks to the Tea Party folks who denounced government and regulation. Biden clearly learned that cautious recoveries are of little benefit to communities, families, or government budgets. Austerity in the face of a recession is a ridiculous way to recover.
2. Biden has been around forever and this is an asset. Biden knows the personalities and weaknesses of world leaders you've heard of and policy makers and staffers who you've never heard of. Biden knows which sharp policy wonks have ideas for stimulating investments, create jobs, and lower carbon emissions. He knows how to get people from across the aisle to vote for his infrastructure spending. Put more simply, Biden knows policies, policy makers and politicians - American and foreign. This makes him incredibly effective.
3. Biden's policy wonks are at work on programs that will never get properly covered because they're largely too ... well, wonky to appeal to the average reader who just wants to hear why they should be offended at Trump today or get confirmation that this week - sure enough - Biden is another week older. Someday some of his policy makers will write fascinating books about the causes and consequences of this economy and a few of us weird people who delight in things like that will delight in that; most people will remain blissfully unaware.
4. Biden consciously incurred a big fiscal deficit in his first year knowing that the best way to reduce long-term debt is to stimulate an economy to its full potential. He realized that the first priority was to put Americans back to work and then household and government budgets will strengthen. But his policy was not a one year, one trick policy. He's stimulating investments in local communities that result in new infrastructure, new factories, and new training programs. And the result is dramatic: projections of long-term deficits have halved since Biden has taken office. link
Biden's policies are stimulating the economy from a number of directions. He's ignited a variety of infrastructure projects. The interstate highway bill Eisenhower signed into law stimulated GDP growth by roughly 0.5% per year for decades. (And when average GDP growth is close to 2%, 0.5% extra is extraordinary.) The interstate highway bill stimulated the economy during highway construction. That won't surprise you. And then it stimulated the economy as people used it, stimulating travel, trade, and inter-city and interstate exchange as chains like McDonalds and Hilton Hotels emerged. Biden is not just stimulating the economy with various infrastructure projects and subsidies to alternative energy projects and manufacturing, he's setting us up for years of extra economic activity as these new bridges continue to stimulate trade and travel and these new factories continue to support jobs and productivity.
The most extraordinary outcome of Biden's policies is the incredible rate of job growth. One of the elements behind that that is rarely reported? The extraordinary rate of new business formation. This statistic gets hardly any coverage and yet seems to me the most important of all economic statistics - speaking as it does to the levels of optimism and long-term implications for the creation of new jobs, new products, new services, new markets, and new wealth. New business formation in the decade of the 2020s is running at TWICE the level it did in the decade of the 2000s. Double. 2X. So, so much more. And the ripple effect of that is one reason that in the first quarter of 2024 - now in the fourth year of the recovery from the worst of COVID - job creation is running at an even higher rate than it did last year.
The phenomenal rates of business formation and job creation are not the product of chance. They are the result of policy choices from a politician who delights in politics and policy in a time when it is so very stylish to hold politicians, politics and policy in contempt. Fortunately, Joe Biden still thinks that politics and policy matter, and rather than blow things up the way his predecessor did, he's building an economy that creates jobs and businesses at the fastest rate in your lifetime.
04 April 2024
Lincoln's 44 Days Without War
March 4, Lincoln was inaugurated for his 1st term as president
April 12, Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, officially beginning the Civil War.
Lincoln had 39 days of peace in his first term.
In 1865,
March 4, Lincoln was inaugurated for 2nd term
April 9 - Sunday - Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox
April 14 - Good Friday, Lincoln was shot
April 15 - Saturday morning - Lincoln died
Lincoln had 5 days of peace in his second term.
In the 1,504 days of his presidency, Lincoln had only 44 days without war.
"There have been 16,000 books and articles published on Lincoln—125 on the assassination alone—more than any other American."
02 April 2024
Regret in the UK - Post-BREXIT GDP Slowdown and the Case for Globalization
How much of a slog? Look at the graph below. Real GDP growth in the UK in the 6 years before BREXIT was 13.0%. In the 6 years after it has been only 7.7% - a drop in growth rate of about 40%. (By contrast, US GDP grew by 12% in the 6 years before and by 13.1% in the 6 years after.)
This isn't complicated. Communities that become part of the larger world prosper.
Reversing globalization is fear-based politics that is bad for the economy. It's exciting to attack globalists but they're right about the benefits of being connected to the world outside your borders.
Communities that Least Understand the Economy Are Most Likely to Find Trump Persuasive
Nationwide, Trump got 47% of the vote.
In the 10 counties with the highest average wages, Biden got nearly 4X as many votes as Trump.
In the 10 counties with the lowest average wages, Biden got only 0.8 votes for each vote Trump got.
What is the difference in wages in the 10 highest and 10 lowest paid counties? The highest make 2.7X as much on average.
Here is the latest data (3Q 2023) on the 10 highest and 10 lowest paying counties.
Average Annual Wages
US: $69,368
Bottom Ten Counties: $46,160
Top Ten Counties: $123,415
29 March 2024
The Land Battle for States Gives Way to the Cultural Battle for Nations - the Modern World as a Lava Lamp
In the 20th century, people fought with tanks and planes over those map lines, trying to say, "This land is mine." But now, the big battles are more about who we are and what we believe in, like sustainability, equality, rules, and investments. These fights aren't about grabbing a piece of land; they're about shaping the world with our ideas. And of course these battles don't end with a flag in the ground. They keep going, evolving, just like the ever-changing swirls in a lava lamp.
28 March 2024
The Religious Right's Pyrrhic Victory (Or, The Cost of Using Trump As A Representative)
The religious right may think they are selling bibles. Others may simply see it as selling out.
27 March 2024
Kahneman On Substituting Easy Questions for Uesful Questions
Here is a blog post from 2011 that I wrote about one of his key ideas – our tendency to substitute trivial questions for hard questions.
One of the great mysteries of life is how we get sucked into political arguments of no consequence. Can you burn a flag? Can he wear a dress? Can she say that?
Which questions, by contrast, have real consequence? Questions like Will this economic policy make more people rich? Will that economic policy make fewer people poor? Will this political policy give more people rights? Will this policy extend or shorten life expectancies?
I think I found the answer to why we waste so much time trying to sound smart talking about such stupid issues in Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
One concept Kahneman shares has to do with our tendency to substitute easy questions for hard ones. For me, this explains why so much airtime in politics is taken up with questions of little consequence.
Kahneman gives an example of an analyst who bought stock in Ford. Asked why, the analyst replied that he'd just been to a car show and left convinced that Ford "sure can make great cars." As Kahneman points out, the real question when buying stock is whether or not the stock is undervalued. But the analyst substituted that difficult question for the simpler question of whether Ford was making good cars. All of us, when faced with a difficult question, tend to substitute a simpler - albeit irrelevant - one.
It seems to me that the big question in politics should be, How do we improve quality of life for more people? That’s a big question and answering it is one that isn’t easy. It is a challenge to feel confident about one's ability to answer it.
By contrast, the little and largely irrelevant questions – silly questions best characterized by whether or not we should be able to burn the flag or use a bathroom that says Woman or Man – are ones for which we have clear answers as long as we have strong opinions. We don't need data. We don't need studies. Answering these questions leaves us feeling confident in our own judgment. Answering the big questions, by contrast, makes us feel uncertain. For most of us, we prefer feeling confident to feeling ignorant. The result? We choose questions because of how they make us feel rather than what their answers will do to improve the world.
And that’s a pity. Just think what we could do with all the attention paid to politics if it were focused on real, albeit difficult, questions. Questions that have the potential to make us more humble and the world better - rather than make us more smug and make the world no better.
25 March 2024
Benjamin Franklin's Power over Power
23 March 2024
Money Saving Tip - Hacking into Advertising
Here's a money-saving tip. Next time you see an ad for an enticing product, just re-enact the ad. Skip the product altogether and go straight for the joy the product delivers.
"Should we go shopping?"
"No. Just smile more."
It Is No Coincidence - How the Loss of Aspiring Novelists Has Undermined the Power and Purpose of the Daily Newspaper
One of the reasons that the world feels more chaotic now is that the folks reporting it to us don't understand fiction, don't understand stories. There's always been chaos. News - to make any sense at all - has to construct a narrative. The aspiring novelist - who saw daily events as part of a bigger narrative - were better at that important task.
It's no coincidence that we're increasingly divided as newspapers drift into obsolescence and we lose the narrative glue that binds together imagined communities like nation-states.
20 March 2024
The Whimsy and Magic of Physico-theology
"In Germany, physico-theology gave rise to a large number of specialisms praising different aspects of creation, such as ichthyotheology (fish), petinotheology (birds), testaceotheology (snails), melittotheology (bees), chortotheology (grass), brontotheology (thunder) and sismotheology (earthquakes), each of which had at least one book devoted to it. The Netherlands produced also theologies of snow, lightning and grasshoppers."
19 March 2024
Trump Threatens a Bloodbath
Here's a little reminder that every time we have Republican presidents in office - every time - the number of manufacturing jobs goes down. As it did with Trump. And by contrast, every time a Democrat is in the White House the number of manufacturing jobs goes up. As it has with Biden. Republican policies haven't created manufacturing jobs in a century.
So, he might be threatening violent mobs if he loses, Or he might be lying about how another Biden term will destroy manufacturing jobs. If the first, he's assuming that Americans are cowards; if the second, he's assuming Americans are stupid. Me? I'm assuming that in either case he's just projecting.
18 March 2024
California - land of the most successful capitalists in the history of the world
- the US: 89% ($24.8 trillion)
- the West Coast: 64% ($17.7 trillion)
- California: 44% ($12.3 trillion)
- California's Bay Area: 43% ($11.9 trillion)
15 March 2024
The Stark and Persistent Labor Market Difference Between Democratic and Republican Presidencies
What is bad? A positive number. It shows that the unemployment rate rose during that presidency.
Blue bars indicate a Democratic presidency.
13 March 2024
4 Year Anniversary of COVID in the USA - and how deadly it was to be an American during the pandemic
So, to repeat, per million death rate from COVID
Japan - 156
Canada - 919
US - 2,750
Which is to say, Americans died from COVID at 3X the rate as Canadians and at 18X the rate as the Japanese. It was pretty deadly to be an American during the pandemic.
06 March 2024
Trump Refers to the US as a Third-World Country - Unclear if That's a Campaign Promise or Threat
Republicans get all excited by that sort of talk - still recovering as they are from the trauma of the "great doubling of egg prices in 2023."
04 March 2024
One Reason a Nation Might Turn to a Tyrant
People who don't know any history might actually fall for that offer and think that trading sclerotic bureaucracies for an unchecked despot is a good trade. It never is.
01 March 2024
Another Sign the Job Market is Cooling: Wage Hike for Job Switching Has Dropped From Its All-Time High
28 February 2024
Real GDP Growth Highest in 18 years
The three years with highest real GDP growth in the last 19 years:
2021: 5.8%
2005: 3.5%
2023: 3.1%
In simpler terms, GDP growth over the last few years - adjusted for inflation - is the best it's been in decades.
data:
23 February 2024
26 US Counties with Highest Wages - Silicon Valley Continues to Dominate
Raw data:
21 February 2024
A Market Economy - Or What It Will Be Like When the Price of Lunch Bounces Around Like Stock Prices - Wendy's Adopts Dynamic Pricing
"What? For a dollar an hour?"
20 February 2024
Invented Word of the Day: Petipreneur
18 February 2024
The Curiously Recursive Problem of the Meta-Fictional Genre
16 February 2024
Trump Needs the Support of Reasonable Republicans to Win. In November We Learn Their Price
Biden made a promise he's kept: he won't raise taxes on incomes less than $400,000. What that means is that if - say - you make $500,000 a year and the difference in marginal tax rate from a Trump to a Biden is 2%, you would pay $2,000 more under a Biden than a Trump presidency. (And actually that has not yet happened but its a fear among many Republicans.) Out of a half a million income. So, essentially 0.4% (that four-tenths of a percent) of your total salary in additional taxes.
Trump will deport young adults who have never known any country but the US but came here "illegally" when they were little kids. Trump will enable Putin to invade countries throughout Western Europe. (Putin is the first European leader since Hitler to invade a neighboring country. Trump supports that.)
If the reasonable Republicans decide that they would need to be paid more than $2,000 to ruin or end so many lives, Trump has no chance of winning in November. The MAGA boys are not enough for a national victory.
13 February 2024
McGilchrist on Truth and Trust
"Truth and trust, words that come from the same root, naturally go together. One cannot have trust in a society where no one is speaking the truth. and one cannot report truth to a society where there is no trust. Confucius told his disciple that a stable society needs three things: weapons, food, and trust. If you must forgo one of these, you should first forgo weapons. Then food. Without trust we cannot stand. Trust cost nothing but the time to build it. Once built it is a fantastically efficient way for any human enterprise to operate. There is a Dutch proverb, Trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback."
- Dr Iain McGilchrist
09 February 2024
The Engineering of Consent and the Invention of Propaganda - Freud's Nephew Edward Bernays (1891 to 1995)
"We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of."
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
These quotes are from Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew. Bernays was the first to apply psychological principles to influence public opinion and market products. He was said to have "invented propaganda" for business and politics in a time of mass media, his life spanning the invention of the radio, the TV, and the internet. Bernays was born in 1891, in Vienna, Austria and died in 1995, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
08 February 2024
Trump's Tactical Error That Will Cost Him the Election
Hillary Clinton was more prepared and knowledgeable than any candidate in history. She had numerous policy papers.
Trump didn't bother with policy papers. He just wrote Tweets.
Clinton's 2016 policy papers had more than 50,000 words total.
In 2016, Trump's tweets were never more than 140 characters. (The limit at the time. And those were characters, not words.)
No one read Clinton's policy papers. Everyone read Trump's tweets.
Trump kept everyone's attention and in 2016, he won.
In 2017, Twitter doubled its limit to 280 characters and in 2020, Trump lost. His tweets had become too long to hold our attention.
Now in 2024, Trump only posts to Truth Social, which has a 500 character limit.
A bloat from 140 to 280 to 500 characters, each iteration more demanding to read. Trump's biggest weakness as a candidate is his unfounded optimism about how much the attention-span of average Americans has grown in the last 8 years.
[A friend calls me aside. "Ron. It's like you don't even read your own posts. Do you actually think anyone has read this far? You think that people will make it to your conclusion?"
"I just thought ..."
"- Ron. Nobody is going to read this far."
"But ..."
"Shhh. Just read your own post. Nobody else will."]
Progress Comes From the Interplay of Technology, Social Invention and New Ideas of What it Means to Be Human
Progress comes out of an interplay of technological and political advances, social invention and technological invention continually disrupting and reshaping each other, democracy and capitalism never getting the upper hand for long, and continually changing reality, people, and their institutions and each other. Economic progress includes technological change, cultural change, changes to processes and politics, and even to our notions of what it means to be human and what is possible. Progress impacts everything and is impacted by everything.
06 February 2024
Economic Reporting As if It Were a Romance Novel
"It's a beautiful, sunny day Heathcliff. My heart is full. Please kiss me!"
Heathcliff, mournfully, "Someday we are all going to die."
Meanwhile, in economic reporting:
"Unemployment is at its lowest in 60 years! The stock market is at record highs! Inflation has dropped to 2%. New business formation is 50% higher than it has ever been!"
"Yes but the economy will eventually fall into a recession. It might not be for a decade. It might start next month. But it will eventually falter. And that bad news - however speculative and far into the future - is the real news."
Biden's Mixed Feelings About Trump Learning That Presidents Are Not Immune From Prosecution
President Biden had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, his political opponent still faces criminal charges for plotting to subvert the 2020 election. On the other hand, he had to cancel the SEAL team he had scheduled to, er, take advantage of his presidential immunity for any crimes committed while in office.
[If you're going to claim that presidents have immunity for any crimes committed while in office, you probably want to do that when you - and not your political opponent - are in office.]
03 February 2024
The Egg, the Potato, and the Coffee Bean in Hot Water
The egg is made hard by the experience and the potato is made soft, By the exact same experience. So there's that.
31 January 2024
Powell's Risk Has Shifted from Inflation to Unemployment
26 January 2024
The Absurdly Good Fourth Quarter of 2023 (a heck of a way to run a recession)
(All averages are for this 21st century.)
target: 2%
actual: 2%
Avg: 2.6%
494k
Avg: 275k
3.7%
Avg: 5.8%
Up 14%
Avg: Up 2.7%
Up 3.3%
Avg: 2%
25 January 2024
2024 Year of the Dragon - Boldness, Enthusiasm, Innovation and ... Imagination
And when the animal for a year is imaginary, that has to say something about the importance of imagination, right?* In any case, it's a second chance to start the new year right.
Economic Data on Jobs, S&P 500, GDP Growth and Deficits From Reagan Through Biden's Presidencies - Spot the Patterns
2. Job creation is stronger during Democratic presidencies.
Perhaps you can see other patterns. I'd be curious as to what those are.
23 January 2024
You Must Be This Angry to Vote - Donald's Republican Party
- Ronald Reagan
“We’re a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin. We have become a drug infested, crime-ridden nation, which is incapable of solving the simplest of problems.”
- Donald Trump
Reagan's "It's morning again in America," has become Trump's campaign marked by "mourning again in America."
This negativity is helped along by almost laughably negative economics coverage.
If it were a novel, it would include dialogue like this:
"It's a beautiful, sunny day Heathcliff. Kiss me!"Heathcliff, through clenched teeth, "Someday we are all going to die."
"Unemployment is at record lows! The stock market is at record highs! Inflation is dramatically lower!""Yes but the economy will eventually fall into a recession. It might not be for a decade. It might be next week. But it will eventually falter. And that bad news - however speculative - is the real news."
19 January 2024
Haecceity: the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing
I kind of love this: the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing. Or, the irreducible determination of a person that makes it this particular person.
So, what is your haecceity?
18 January 2024
The Odds of Layoff Are the Lowest They've Been in Your Career (and what the unemployment claims stat would look like as a cartoon)
If stats were cartoons, this stat would look like this:
13 January 2024
American women don't like Trump and Trump doesn't like American women - and one of the most stunning stories lost in chaos of Trump's last week in office
Donald has been married three times, once to an American for 4 years. Every other woman he marries is an immigrant.
He made that American – Marla Maples – sign a prenup, a document in which he claimed to be worth $1.17 billion and offered Marla only one million dollars – with no alimony – when they divorced. His child support for Tiffany would continue only to 21 and would stop if Tiffany got a job or joined the army or Peace Corp.
Ivana – the mother of three of his children – is rather bizarrely buried in one of his golf courses. Her burial does grant Trump certain tax breaks on the New Jersey golf course where she is buried. “The New Jersey tax code does exempt cemetery land from all taxes, rates, and assessments. Potentially, her grave could save the property from paying a significant sum in a state with high tax rates.”
In the 2020 election, it was women who elected Joe Biden and sent Trump back to Mar-a-Lago. 52% of voters were women and they voted for Biden by a 15-point margin – 57% of women voted for Biden and only 42% voted for Trump.
The day after Trump’s inauguration, the Woman’s March was the largest single-day protest in American history – involving somewhere between 1.0 to 1.6 percent of all Americans – about 3 to 5 million people.
And of course, Donald doesn’t like American women. At least 18 women have accused this man - who bragged that if you are a star you could grab women by the p**** - of sexual harassment. A judge in the Jean Carroll case that found Trump guilty clarified that the charge against him did qualify as rape. Donald owned the Miss Teen Beauty Pageant and bragged about how that allowed him to walk into the dressing area to ogle the teenage girls as they got dressed for the contest.
One of the clearest indications of Donald’s feelings for women was lost in the noise of 3,000 Americans a day dying from COVID and the aftermath of the January 6th assault on the Capitol. The two women he appointed to his Cabinet resigned after that assault on democracy. And what did Donald make a priority amid the turmoil of a riot, an attempted coup, cabinet resignations, and a pandemic?
On January 13, with only one week left in his presidency, Trump rushed through the execution of Lisa Montgomery. Her death marked the first federal execution of a woman in nearly 70 years. Donald made her execution a priority and one of the last things he did before leaving office.
[source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/us/politics/lisa-montgomery-execution.html ]
11 January 2024
Unemployment, inflation, job creation and COVID-related deaths - before, during, and after a global pandemic.
2019 - low inflation and unemployment and 2 million jobs created
Pandemic
2020 - drop in demand results in huge layoffs and drop in household spending translates into a sharp rise in unemployment - more than 9 million jobs lost - and a drop in inflation along with demand.
2021
Worst year for COVID deaths and yet - as more Americans are vaccinated - economy opens back up. Inflation spikes while the economy creates a record number of jobs, bringing unemployment back down to below 4%.
Recovery
2022
Recovery begins in earnest. The rate of job creation is still higher than any year on record - except for 2021. With the economy so strong and demand so high, inflation begins to drop but is still high.
Normalization
2023
COVID deaths now - like flu - are part of annual death toll. By yearend, unemployment had been at a sub-4% level for longest stretch since the 1960s. As job creation slows, inflation slowly falls back to a normal range (but still roughly one point higher than pre-pandemic.)
The economy - and society more broadly - absorbed an historic spike in loss of life and jobs for a couple of years and has largely returned to normal. It is hard to imagine that it could have turned out much better. Easy to believe that it could have turned out much worse. (The economy has never before created more than 7 million jobs in a single year - or even 5 million jobs for that matter. This recovery - getting back to unemployment below 4% - could have easily taken years longer.)
The only comparable wave of death and economic contraction was the Spanish flu in 1918 and after, the recovery from which was a contributing factor to the roaring '20s. There is a very real possibility that these 2020s will represent another roaring 20s.
07 January 2024
Some Stark Contrasts Between The 2024 Candidates
- Spent a record amount of time as president tweeting, watching TV and golfing. (Trump sent an average of 33 tweets per day, roughly the number Biden sends each month.)
- Cheated on his third wife (who was home with their newborn) with a porn star (who he paid with campaign funds). He is the favorite of evangelicals.
- Insisted that the national government had no responsibility for COVID response - that a pandemic sweeping across the globe should be the responsibility of state and local governments and not his administration - and had Americans dying of COVID in his last month in office at a rate of more than one 9-11 per day, a pandemic that was particularly deadly for the elderly. He is the favorite of old people.
- Holds the record for worst job creation (or best job destruction) during a presidency since modern records began after the Great Depression. He is the favorite of people who say he's good for the economy.
- Incited an insurrection to overturn the election results from 2020 and has promised to use the office for retribution against political enemies once re-elected. 2 states have already pointed to the 14th amendment as reason to take him off their ballot for the 2024 election. He is the favorite of folks who talk about the importance of the constitution.
- Presided over the worst rise in violent crime in American history. He is the favorite of Americans who want someone tough on crime.
- Weekly rates of death from COVID have fallen to 3% of what they were under Trump. (He treated the COVID response as a national - not a local government - issue.)
- The unemployment rate is at its lowest rate for the longest time since the late 1960s. (He signed a stimulus bill that rapidly lowered unemployment.)
- During Biden's presidency, violent crime has dropped to its lowest levels since the 1960s.
- New business applications are at a record level. Not just up slightly. They are up almost 50% from what they were a short time ago. stats here: https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/visualizations/interactivegraphs.html
35 months into Biden's presidency, the economy has created 14.3 million jobs. In Clinton's first term, the economy created 11.6 million and in the first of his terms for which BLS posts numbers, the economy created 11.2 million jobs under FDR. The two worst first terms in modern times were under George W. Bush - the economy created about 100,000 jobs - and Trump, during which the economy lost 2.6 million jobs Thus far, the economy has created 2.7 million more jobs under Biden's presidency compared to Clinton, who has the second best numbers. The gap between Trump and W. Bush is also 2.7 million - but of course Trump's gap is 2.7 million worse than it was under Bush.
06 January 2024
The Percentage of Americans Who Made $1 Million in Wages in 2022
- 90% earned at least $5,000.
- 50% earned at least $40,847.18 - the median wage.
- 10% earned at least $120,000
- 1% earned at least $350,000
- 0.1% earned at least $1 million
- 0.003% - or more than 5,000 - earned at least $10 million in 2022.
- Only 227 earned $50,000,000 or more.
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2022