Are You Better Off Than You Were 4 Years Ago? Maybe if You Were in a Coma and Blissfully Unaware

Are you better off than you were 4 years ago? In May of 2020?

The United States first reached 1,000 daily COVID-19 deaths in early April 2020. This grim milestone marked the beginning of a period where the country consistently saw high daily death rates due to the pandemic. The daily death rate remained above 1,000 until late February of 2021, peaking at roughly 3,000 a day just after the 2020 election during Trump's last month in office when he did nothing to mitigate the pandemic but focused instead on overturning the vote of a majority of Americans.

In May, the BLS announced that 20 million jobs had been lost in April, shattering all previous records for jobs lost in a year, much less one month.

During the period from late May to June 2020, it is estimated that between 15 million and 26 million Americans participated in the Black Lives Matter protests. These demonstrations were sparked by the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and quickly spread across the United States, becoming the largest protest movement in American history.

The anti-fascist (Antifa) and anti-Trump protests also saw significant activity during this time. Protests against President Donald Trump's policies and rhetoric were frequent throughout his presidency, but they intensified in the summer of 2020, particularly in response to his handling of the protests and the federal government's aggressive tactics against demonstrators. These protests often coincided with the BLM demonstrations, adding to the overall atmosphere of civil unrest across the country.

4 years ago Americans
were dying,
protesting, and
losing jobs
at the fastest rate in American history.

Oh, and Trump was tweeting at an unprecedented rate even for him, much less any other president: Trump averaged 34 tweets a day in his final year in office, in the midst of all this.

Entering a Global Pandemic With a President Who Had Unprotected Sex with a Porn Star - High On the List of Poor Decisions Made by Americans

Stormy Daniels' testimony is a reminder that we went into a global pandemic with a president who had unprotected sex with a porn star. What a shock that under his leadership the US suffered so much more tragedy than comparable countries. A keen medical mind that thought we might be able to spray bleach inside the body to fight this virus.

data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-cases-deaths-per-million?tab=map

The Longest Streak of Unemployment Rate at or Below 4% That You Can Remember

You have to go back more than half a century to find a longer streak of months with unemployment at or below 4%. Or as the memes and journalists desperate for clicks like to describe it, "Might this be the worst economy ever?" {Spoiler alert: no. No it is not.]

Only in the 1950s and 1960s did the US economy have a longer stretch of unemployment rate under 4%. It's now 30 months in a row of unemployment at 4% or lower. Hard to believe that the Fed will hit its target rate of inflation of 2.something without bringing unemployment above 4%, suggesting that this streak could end within a month or two, falling just short of the streak from the early 1950s. You remember that streak, right? [Second spoiler alert in a single post: no. No you don't. The last streak longer than this was from before you can remember.]